The New Era in UFO Research with Jacques Vallée

Transcript

Thinking Allowed, conversations on the leading edge of knowledge and discovery with psychologist Jeffrey Mishlove. Hello and welcome. I'm Jeffrey Mishlove.

Our topic today is the new era in UFO research. My guest is the legendary UFO researcher, Jacques Vallée. He is author of numerous books including Passport to

Magonia, The Invisible College, Messengers of Deception, Forbidden Science in Four Volumes, Wonders in the Sky, Confrontations, A Scientist's Search for Alien Contact, Dimensions, A Casebook of Alien Contact, Revelations, Alien Contact

and Human Deception, and most recently, Trinity, The Best Kept Secret. Jacques is based in the San Francisco region and now I'll switch over to the internet video.

Welcome, Jacques. It's nice to be with you once again. Good to see you, Jeffrey.

You were recently in Europe, I know, when we spoke last. As a matter of fact, you were in Paris and about to attend a number of or one major international meeting of UFO researchers and

government officials from around the world. It seemed to me at the time, and I think to you as well, that this meeting was in effect inaugurating a new era in the field of UFO research.

There were eight nations represented and this is something that we rarely hear people talking about in the United States. We're so dominated

by the American media that we tend to forget that this research has been going on around the world for a very long time. Every country is following the subject, some intensely, some go

through periods of being very interested in it and doing research and then periods where they tend to give up for life, and then the interest reawakens, for example, in Argentina. In the U.S.,

people are only interested in what America does and it's true that it dominates the news and it's true that there are so many competing media in the U.S. that information gets to the surface and people hear about it.

It's a little harder when you're even in France to really keep, for a scientist, to really remain aware of what the observations are at any given time. But there is a good network of amateur

organizations that cover different parts of the country and that report on that. The French have not instituted a military control like the U.S.

has. In the U.S., essentially, the Pentagon has always controlled the news about UFOs, either through the Air Force, through the Navy, and now through the new structure that has been

set up, which is good. But most of the reports that, as a scientist, I want to study, are civilian reports. They are not classified.

They may not involve high technology, but they involve people experiencing a phenomenon and that's really the root of the problem for scientists. That's where we have to start.

In France, the government agency that is in charge of gathering the information and studying it is a civilian agency. It's the space agency, the French equivalent of NASA, the CNES.

I've been privileged to be asked to serve on a panel, on a scientific review panel, for the last six years. We follow the most interesting reports that have not been explained at the various levels.

It's a very rewarding place from which to study the phenomenon because it has been reviewed by pretty much every scientific discipline along the way. It's a small group, but it has access to all the

resources, not only of CNES, but of the research organizations, of the medical organizations, and so on. It has been in existence for 40 years and I don't think people know that in the U.S.

You mentioned there were eight countries there, so France would be one example, but I know UFO sightings are reported in every country pretty much. There are reports

in every country. They are followed not necessarily on a regular basis by every country, but Holland was there, very interested. Norway, Sweden,

Germany, Spain of course has compiled files on the subject for a long time and with all exchange data across Europe. Argentina was represented with a teleconferencing link and it makes for

a very rich discussion. It went on for three days. There was no public, but all the organizations that are doing private research,

credible private research, were there. It was not just a bunch of government people and there was nothing classified. Well, I assume that the fact that the U.S. government, as far as I

can tell, seems to have abandoned its policy of debunking UFO sightings and ridiculing UFO witnesses and contactees. That will have a big impact on the global understanding or

the global search for understanding about UFOs. Yes, and I'm very hopeful. I think it's a new phase. I'm very grateful to be here to see it and to be in reasonably good health to continue my work

and hopefully to exchange data with people who are running those those new projects. As you know, I've been working with them all along and we know each other and so on, but the government

has its own structure and its own need to do things in a certain way, especially when you're talking about the Pentagon. It's a third phase. It's not formal, but I roughly organized the

history into three major phases from 1945 to the Condon Report in 67-68. We have mainly the Air Force taking an interest in this. The Air Force was charged

with the responsibility to follow the reports, to gather them, but they took reports from the public as well as reports from their own pilots or from other branches of the government, like the Navy.

It was different from what's going on now. I mean, the Air Force was really looking at the whole spectrum and they tried to do a good job within their structure and sometimes it was very

good and sometimes it was frankly mediocre. And then in 1967, of course, there was the Condon study that's resulted in the New York Times broadcasting to the world that there was no scientific value in studying new efforts.

So the second phase was very dark. It lasted from 1967 to now. Of course, the research continued in spite of the New York Times,

in spite of the Condon Report, in spite of the Academy of Sciences, because people continued to see things except that they were not being looked at from a scientific viewpoint or from a rational viewpoint.

So you had all kinds of extrapolations. The military continued, of course, to study UFOs because they were showing up on their radar.

So the only difference is that the New York Times didn't know about it and that only the people who are paying attention and doing research, particularly in Silicon Valley, were following all this from a technology

perspective. We knew about it. NASA knew about it, except that nobody was officially talking about it and there was no research being funded

except private research. There are a few groups like New Farm that did an extraordinarily good job of continuing to talk to the witnesses, publish their report and continue to do that and build

databases, as I did. Then the third phase starts now and we really don't know what's going to happen. I think it's very encouraging that Congress

has taken the initiative in forcing openness. Openness is not disclosure. Everybody wants disclosure, but nobody has told us what that meant. I mean, what is there to disclose? If we don't

know what those things are, there is no ultimate disclosure. What there is is a disclosure that there is a phenomenon we don't understand. I think in

the United States, unless you've been buried in a dark room with no TV, you probably know that there is something going on that has not been solved by the Academy and has been kept very quiet by the military or the service.

Now, I don't believe in disclosure that much. I do believe in openness. I think we need to open.

Hopefully, we will open the doors and the windows and let people come forward with their information. As I recall, it was in 1954 or so.

There was, I think I have the name correct, the Robertson panel that argued that the government should try to dismiss interest in UFOs in order to avoid public panic. There was concern that if people thought the

government wasn't in control of things, that would create widespread panic and that should be avoided. That was part of that. That panel, by the way, was top secret.

It was organized by the, so what the people were told, and then what you find in UFO books, is that eventually part of the information was revealed, that that panel had taken place, that the panel had recommended to dismiss most of the reports from the

public because they were so vague and so on, and that on the contrary, there should be more intense attention placed to it by, essentially by the Pentagon, by the armed forces, to try to get better data, which is something that, well, sounds reasonable

given the times. I mean, now we know it's not enough, but in those days, and to some extent that's what's going to happen now. I mean,

there is a group that is very much within the military structure that has been tasked with primarily looking at the military reports because they have sensors, they have aircraft, they have spectra, they have radar, they have infrared

images, they have all those things we've seen, and they have the tools to analyze it and the budgets to analyze it. So the military has already said that they will only look at the best described

and measured part of that. So that will be about maybe two percent of all the reports. Now, the question that any scientist would ask is, what are

you going to do with the other 98 percent? Well, I think I'm interested in the other 98 percent because a farmer in this field is a pretty good sensor of the environment, especially animals react to UFOs.

People see them for minutes or hours, and we can get very good data from that. Human data, we don't get all the scientific data we would like to get, but maybe that will lead to a new generation of sensors we can develop, and then

that's what Mr. Bigelow and the project in Nevada was trying to do, and that idea has continued. It's a good idea.

The other part of the Robertson panel was a lot more dark, and it has come out in little bits and pieces. The reason I have discussed that, as you know, with

Professor Hynek, many times he was there. He testified before the panel. He was not there for every meeting, but I also know the man who was

in charge of photographic intelligence for the Pentagon at the time, who was there and was there in charge of the films and the photographs that were classified, and that he presented to the panel, and he gave me the other side of that.

So they reviewed all the data for several days. The people there were the luminaries of American science. All of them had classified access to a laptop secret in their work, not just for the panel.

So they knew how to handle that kind of data. The concern, the real concern, was that if there was a nuclear attack from the Soviet Union, which in those days

was something that you really had to consider. Not that we don't have to consider it now, but in those days, you know, that was really the number one scenario that you had to watch for. A simulated

wave of UFO reports, a lot of ancients trying to report UFOs to the air force could saturate the teletype network. The air force relied on the network of teletypes.

There was no internet. There was a phone system, but the phone system couldn't be used effectively to get that kind of data. So it relied on the network of teletypes,

and those teletypes could be saturated with all the different organizations within the network reporting fake UFOs. And then during that, you would not have the tools to communicate at the

top level to respond to a nuclear attack. That was the real assignment to the panel. The assignment did not come from the air force.

That was a lie. It came from the Central Intelligence Agency that was running the panel. Now, that's, you

know, something I do remember, because before I left Northwestern University, after my PhD in AI, during the summer, Dr. Heineck said it would be a great idea if I had time to reorganize these

files because these files were very disorganized and, you know, of course, went back many years and had never been restructured. So I had an office in the computation center where I was

working full time at that point. And I went out and bought some filing cabinets throughout the old months, and then started going through all the files, which included the air force files,

which by the way, I spent four years reorganizing and reducing to computer files, and then sorting to find out the real cases from the cases that could be explained in a way that the air force had not done.

And I still have that data. And I hear that one of the things that the new panel is going to do is to review the Congress has said, you need to go back and review the old files. Well, you know, I spent four years with the help

of my wife who was a professional psychologist, the access to Heineck, access to the air force data and Major Quintanillo, and then access to the resources of the university to try to segregate the 20 percent of the data that had to do with UFOs and throw

out the other 80 percent, which did not, which was misperception, misclassifications and so on. We spent four years doing that, taking one month at a time, you know, for the totality of the of Project Bluebook.

And nobody has bothered to review that. But those files are in machine readable form. That's one of the databases we have.

And I'd be happy to donate it to to the new the new guys in charge if if they are interested, or they can redo it themselves. I mean, it's but I don't think Congress realizes how much work is involved just with

that one source of data. Now, the Robertson panel data was in Heineck's files. Dr. Heineck knew

it was there, but had not reviewed it since 1954 in public because everybody was disgusted with the conclusions that essentially closed off the, you know, a lot of the the scientific interest into data.

And, of course, what Dr. Heineck and I wanted to do was get science, American science, to start looking at the data. And

the the Robertson panel was a setback, because they said only the military has the right sensors to get good data, which is in part true. But then you throw out 90 percent of the rest of it, which

includes all the medical impact includes all the open air data, all the all the rest of the data. In the files I found I went through the files, then I restructured them. And I hit a little folder that everybody

had forgotten, especially Dr. Heineck, which had two pages of a memo written to the Robertson panel and to the organizers of the Robertson panel, which were the Air Force and the CIA.

That was my first shock that the panel was not an Air Force panel, that the Air Force was there as a contractor to the intelligence community, which is understandable.

I mean, that's that's really understandable, but it was a much higher level in terms of the global access to data and to science than just what the Air Force was supposed to be doing.

The second surprise I had was that those two pages were marked secret in red. And the term secret had not been scratched out and revised. Now, by then, you know, this was 1968, not 1954.

So usually, over that time, that kind of document would have been expired as a secret document. But it wasn't. So but I had it in my hands.

So I had a problem of what to do with it. And I consulted, consulted Dr. Heineck.

He's the only person I took into my confidence. And I, we decided that we would approach an organization that could declassify it.

And we eventually got a declassified. The first thing I did was to hire an attorney who was familiar with the government and so on, to explain, to ask what the procedure for declassification of

documents. And we wrote to the Air Force because the document was part of an Air Force fight. And the Air Force sent us a, you know, a mimeographed

circular that said if you're interested in Blue Book, you can ask for the for the microfilm. And this is how you do it. And it's deposited at such and such a a depository that

was the end of it. They never really responded to what we were asking. But fortunately, at the time, as I was working with helping a senate

panel on on a different question of access to computer networks, and I had access to someone who was a very highly placed attorney, who was in charge of the on the senate side, in charge of data for the military.

And I explained the situation to him. And he said, send me the memo, the original through, you know, a secure mail, and I will get I will see that it's declassified.

So I went through the legislative branch, because I knew that if we submitted it to the Pentagon, it would be, it would disappear. And we didn't want

disappeared. And this this man is attorney, who was actually the general counsel for for the congressional branch that supervised the budget of the Pentagon. So, you know, we could technically he could

turn off the budget of the Pentagon. So he was in in a good situation to declassify that memo, and made the memo available. Suddenly, people became

aware that there was much more behind the Robertson panel, than what what had been what the public had been told. And that in fact, they had done a very, very thorough job of reviewing the information.

But the question was, why, what was that memo doing there? The memo came from the contractor, namely Battelle Memorial Institute, which had the responsibility initially, for the files that went to Blue Book, they had just done a review

of the Blue Book files, officially, with a large budget for the time, budget that was bigger than the common committee budget was later. And this is in 19 1954 dollars.

And they had come to the conclusion that they were there was research to be done. And that the memo recommended that the Robertson panel not be called, that the project should

be stopped, because there were areas of research that would complete the information that the panel should be given. And that it was premature to gather these top five scientists, including

including a Nobel Prize in physics, to review data that was incomplete. It was a very thoughtful, very smart memo to the top level. It was addressed

to the real organizers of the panel, which was the CIA. And it was ignored. The panel went on. And

the rest of it, you know, is still classified. I hope there are still a few people who remember what happened, because I'd really like to know if what they or Battelle recommended was ever

implemented, because they had a number of recommendations on what should be done in UFO research. And I don't know whether that was ever implemented or not.

I never had the clearances to know that. So there are many areas of darkness that from a historical perspective are extremely interesting. And I hope that the initiative by Congress is going to bring that to the light of day.

I think one of the areas that must have been of concern even as early as 1954, and is probably still of great concern today, is the seeming relationship between UFO sightings and various nuclear

facilities, particularly nuclear missile facilities in the United States. One of the databases that has been developed very well has been developed in France, but it's now public.

Again, it's public, but the public doesn't know that it's public. It's a very, very good database developed in France by people with government facilities of aircraft pilot sightings.

The total database is about 3,000 cases. And the database we were working from was about 800 cases. Dr.

Richard Hayes at NASA collaborated in building the database. And I was part of that. The main person who developed the database is a French,

actually a French working for the French government executive working primarily in defense. But this is a public document to see. They looked at military cases, civilian cases, and private aircraft.

So within the database, you have all three, with the pilots themselves being interviewed on the wreck. So this is not somebody saw a plane, there is a rumor that

the pilots also came in. This is from, you know, they've gone through the actual data, recording many cases radar data, many cases radar visual data for military pilots, private pilots, and

airline pilots. The data is extremely rich. And we've been analyzing it. Nobody knows that, but

you know, this research has been going on. What you find is that there is a discrimination factor in the database between the military planes being approached by UFOs and the civilian planes reporting UFOs. And

again, I don't think anybody in the U.S. has picked up on that research. But certainly something that should be done.

The database is done, a high quality database. It's one of the databases that we turned over to BAS, to the ATIP project. I don't think

it has been analyzed, because I'm no longer, you know, privy to what has happened to the databases that we created. The project was classified.

And I worked on it under the top secret clearance, like the rest of the team in Las Vegas, working with the Bigelow Aerospace Project. The data when, but that particular part of the database is not classified.

It's open, which has integrated it with everything within 260,000 cases worldwide. That database is still classified. But the

pilot database is not. So what was discovered by the people who did that study was that there was a radical difference between the behavior of the phenomenon when it was approaching a

military aircraft and the behavior of the phenomenon with civilian aircraft. That needs to be reinvestigated. It needs to be redone with more data.

We of course, we have more data now. The database is 20 years old. So who is working on it? You know, this is certainly one of the things that needs

to be done. Because if that's verified, it means that the phenomenon has a special interest in military craft, military facilities that and it displays a different behavior than it does in

the other 90% of the cases when it's being seen over fields, over cities, over other areas than the military areas. Now, that's something that again, nobody has looked at seriously, but it's

something that should be picked up. How would you characterize that radical difference? In civilian cases, typically, you know, if you're a member of the Spielberg movie, you know, where,

you know, the control tower says, do you want to report the UFO? And there is a long silence. And the pilot finally says, no, sir, we don't see any UFO.

And the radar shows, you know, the aircraft, which is, you know, a civilian airline plane being approached by UFOs. Well, many of those cases were in fact reported, and we have the

transcript from the pilot. An object, a light, or sometimes a well defined object comes and bases the aircraft. Sometimes it goes around the

aircraft. And then it will go away, will be seen by passengers. It will be seen by the pilots. And

often it's seen by the radar or radars when there are several radars over, you know, a city that can track both the UFO and the aircraft. You know, everybody knows that.

Of course, it was denied for many years. The airlines didn't want any trouble. They didn't want people to be scared, you know, and all of those things.

But Dr. Haynes, with his organization, has done a great job of describing all that. And that contributed to that database.

And that's available. People wanted to take the trouble to look. And this includes a lot of civilian cases. It's a

pity if nobody is going to look at that, and only look at the military cases. The military cases are very different. If typically an object

arrives, it's perceived as a threat by the aircraft. So the devices on the aircraft are going to pick it up. First the radar, and then

infrared sensors, and then other sensors, some of which may be classified, will interrogate the object and will gather data about the object. That's at the end of it. The object seems to be

completely aware of the situation that it's being watched. It may not only pace the aircraft, it can go around it. It can even place itself, as in a case that

was described before the United Nations, you know, later on, by one of the pilots of an army helicopter being on a collision course with an object that came straight at their helicopter until the helicopter went into a crash maneuver, essentially, going down as fast as a helicopter could.

It was one of the big banana-shaped helicopters, you know, with a number of military officers on board, and they all saw that. Here you have a maneuver which is hostile.

I mean, it has to be interpreted as a hostile maneuver. I asked the pilots, Captain Coyne, privately, after when we were at the United Nations, went through their mind

on what did you do when you were on that collision course and you could not avoid the collision. He said, sir, I closed my eyes and prepared to die. Okay, now that's a military officer telling you that he's not

afraid of telling you that he had exhausted all the things he could do in avoiding the collision. Turned out the object came rushing and the helicopter placed itself on top of the helicopter, which was a sky book, okay.

This was not the little helicopter you see, you know, over San Francisco or Albuquerque, and it lifted the helicopter so they, you know, all the controls were down for essentially a crash landing, and the helicopter was going up.

Now, Captain Coyne described that before the political committee of the United Nations, as part of our panel, you know, which everybody has forgotten, and the entire room was completely silent.

You had every country on earth there represented the political committee, the full political committee of the UN, completely silent, because it was obvious.

So this was, you know, when he says, I closed my eyes, prepared to die, you know, as a military officer, again, this was the army, not the Air Force. That was a very special moment.

So that characterizes, you know, there is direct intention to prove something on the part of the phenomenon. Now, of course, it had to be interpreted as hostile.

But frankly, there was nothing they could do. I mean, they couldn't shoot at it, they couldn't do anything else. Nobody

would come to their help. It turned out the helicopter was released and the object went up. Okay. There is no way to avoid looking at this as an attempt

to, number one, to make itself known. So, yeah, this is not something you can keep on denying, no matter, you know, how many PhDs you have, you know, I hear on the radio people saying, well, it was just a balloon,

you know, come on. They all they were, they didn't see very well. Well, you know, they, the team was coming back to their base in Ohio

from an eye exam. Okay. Periodically, if you fly for those sky hoods, you know, the army mandates that you have to have good vision, which is a

reasonable thing to do. And they were coming back from their eyes being tested. So when the skeptics say, well, you know, they had fuzzy vision,

they were tired, and so on. I mean, that's, that's just complete ignorance. Complete negligence, actually on the part of scientists.

So that's the difference between the behavior of the phenomenon when it's over, over a base, a nuclear base. When it's, you know, when it's, you know,

over a military aircraft, and over commercial aircraft, or private aircraft. So those are the things that people need to know, if they are going to restart the research serious way.

And the only way they are going to know it is by looking at the work that has been done over the last 50 years, you know, going through these phases and accumulating the data, and the people who have

documented this were not a bunch of, you know, stupid people in Silicon Valley, as I've been told recently, or a bunch of amateurs, although the amateurs have done a good job. But, you know, they

were teams of professionals of scientists of different disciplines, looking at this with the military officers, with pilots, with retired commercial pilots and so on, in, on their own time, not being paid, documenting the data.

Fortunately, the technology that we have now with just the computers in this room, you know, are way above what you would have found in a university computing center 20 years ago, in terms of the things we can do,

the things we know how to do, like developing new software. So don't give me this thing that this was amateur research that we can now forget, and now we're going to do it right, okay? We need

everybody involved, we need all the data, we need to look at what has been done in the past, and we need to do it right. I seem to recall there have been reports of UFOs appearing in the

vicinity of nuclear missile sites, I think maybe in North Dakota, for example, and disarming the missile relaunch, launch mechanisms, if true. I don't know whether that's true, but I would think

that sort of thing would be of great interest today to the military. That is true, and it has been true in several countries, and there have been meetings that are known, I mean,

this is on the record, between the U.S. and first with Soviet Union, more recently Russia, because the Russians had the same experience, and nobody wants to, I mean, there may be a nuclear

exchange at some point, people are now talking about Ukraine, you know, it could happen, it would be crazy, but it could happen, and nobody wants to launch, you know, an intercontinental nuclear missile by mistake. I mean, it

may be launched, but there are, it was thought that there were guidelines to prevent missiles going off, you know, without anybody intending to launch them, and some of those incidents got the attention of all the security people worldwide, because if somebody can take

control of a nuclear launch site, then, you know, a lot of regulations, a lot of precautions have to be redone, and of course that's beyond my level, it's beyond the level of the people now looking at UFOs and Congress, and okay, it's, it has to be done at an international level

where we can discuss it realistically with our potential enemies, and that's a very different kind of meeting. I'm under the impression that in the popular UFO culture, which is

something of a circus, there is a belief that these UFOs will save us from ourselves if it ever came to nuclear war, and that's what they're demonstrating. I sort of followed that for a while, and sort of, it would be nice to

entertain that idea. The fact is that we came very, very close to nuclear war by accident three times, and those three times have been reviewed in great detail.

There have even been movies about it, about, you know, accidental nuclear war, and those were real, and those were very scary. That has happened to several countries, but in the

US it has happened three times, when, including one time, when the system was at the high, you know, the DEFCON classification, when the B-52s had taken off, and it had to be recalled. Now, that is,

and there were no UFOs intervening to stop it, so you can, it's a nice idea, but I don't think that they care that much about it. Well, I guess the real issue, in terms of the present era, and

what we can look forward to is, will the United States develop a government sponsored non-military research program of the sort you mentioned has been going on in France for the last 40 years? That's really one of the questions facing both

Congress and the Pentagon today. You know, what is it you want? And some people have already responded on the record at the hearings, you know, a few, a couple of months ago.

I heard one of the officers saying that this would be, should be looked at within the United States, away from other countries, because of the potential of discovering things which would be strategically

important, and that industry could use, especially the defense industry, could learn something from looking at the US for records, which they've been looking at it all the time, you know, but now looking at it with much greater

resources across the military branches to develop so that the US could have better defense technologies. That's a valid idea. It's certainly one that will be at the forefront before Congress.

Congress will have to make a decision on this, based on the assessment of the analysts. Okay, that's what the, you know, the analysts are for on both sides of the of the fence.

The other discussion is, this is potentially a threat to humanity. You know, so if you, if you, if you extrapolate, if you take the these descriptions seriously, and now you have to take

them seriously, because you know that if you if you look at the data that has been vetted, we, we have all the parameters. We can answer pretty much any question that the academy would have,

okay, about the status of the subject today, okay, and people are going to discover if the current effort goes on, which I hope to see, to live long enough to see, people will discover that objects have been recovered, and that we we have

access to the materials. And as you know, we we've already done our own research at our own level, about to document that, both in my books and in, you know, in Trinity, and also in the lab.

And we've published the results in the scientific press. So this is on the record. It's not a rumor. It's

not just a bunch of nice people with ideas. This is on the record on the scientific right. So yeah, we can build on that.

I mean, so and we can build on that with other countries. And that's what that meeting in France was all about. Because

France has had a group like that working openly for over 40 years with government funding, with access to government resources. So we can build on that.

And one of the questions that people ask me is, you know, since I'm in the, you know, fairly unique position of having an access to the US data, I mean, I was part of, you know, a tip bass of those projects.

But I also on the advisory board for the French CNES for the last five years. So I know the French government data. And I

know the French government channels that are used to filter, examine, and access the data. So people say, you know, why don't the other countries come up with their data and publish it? Well, the

French have published their data, you know, it's, it's on the record, it's on the internet, anybody can look at it. They have not been completely open with the rest of it at the government level. The French government has never said, we think there are UFOs,

okay. They encourage research on an unknown subject in science. Like, you know, a lot of cancer research is an unknown subject in

science. The shape of the universe is an unknown subject in science. The, what determines the date of the birth of a baby is an unknown subject in

genetics, okay. We don't really understand it. So there are a number of open subjects in science, and UFOs is one of them. The French government

has never said, we believe that there are real UFOs, and that the United States should communicate with us. And the reason is, and it's, it's a puzzle for many people that I know in Silicon Valley,

I mean, they have all this data, you know, why don't they go public and say, we're going to study it openly. And because we believe that the phenomenon is real.

Well, they haven't done, they haven't taken that step, because everybody is in awe of the power, and frankly, the resources of the United States, of the Academy of Sciences, of all the, all the astronomers in the

United States, all the, you know, American science is number one, not in every area. But it's number one in most important areas of science. So no scientist

in France is going to volunteer to go against that with a proclamation that he knows that UFOs are real and potentially, you know, an important subject in science, because he doesn't want to be ridiculed by the American Academy of Sciences.

And the American Academy of Sciences is has never reversed its assessment that there is nothing there, even now. So that we know members of the Academy were open to research, were encouraging

research, were participating in research, either in the Academy of Medicine, or the Academy of Technology, or the Academy of Science. But they, that's not a public statement from the Academy.

And until that happens, I doubt that any academician or any top scientist with a lab, and with a budget for his lab to continue his research is going to go public with that kind of statement until the US does it first.

So in other words, we're really not yet in a new era, we're maybe on the cusp, but certainly the New York Times has gone public, but that's really not enough is what you're saying. Yeah, the last time the New York Times

went public was after the Conan report, where the New York Times published the Conan report, that said that nobody should study UFOs because it was a waste of money, and there was nothing there. So the New York Times has a business to it.

Well, they have released the Navy photos of the sightings off the coast of California. That's well acknowledged at this point. I think the report that went to Congress seemed like

an official government acknowledgement that there is an unknown phenomenon. Now they're calling it unidentified aerial phenomena rather than UFOs, maybe as a way to separate themselves from the earlier world.

But I guess I still hear you saying that they haven't gone far enough yet. We're not there yet. I think the breakthrough has come from a small

number of very courageous people going public, including officers from the Pentagon and so on, with the right credentials, including Mr. Mellon, who had had a high position under two presidents, calling attention to the data

and then pushing for data to be released. The Nimitz was part of that, the Nimitz photographs and films, infrared films, and there were at least two other cases. And then other cases are still classified that were shown to

Congress. Now, yes, that's a breakthrough. And again, I'm happy to have had the opportunity to live long enough to see that and to see that change, the sea change, where now the phenomenon

has been acknowledged officially. That doesn't go far enough because the scientific community has looked at that and has many members of the scientific community have gone public and even created their own organizations to say now

we're ready to study this with the resources at our disposal, with our labs, with our computers, with our microscopes. And as you know, a number of scientists I've worked with, including Dr.

Gary Nolan at Stanford, have started to put their lab facilities at work on some of the data. I've transferred to Dr. Nolan all my collection

of residual materials that I had from a number of cases and we started to study them together. And there is a small team now in California. And as you know, there is a small team at Harvard

and the Dr. Avi Loeb now developing new optical systems to document what's going on. So you have at least two major universities where, you know, first-rate

scientists are at work on their own time, on their own budgets, developing these new methodologies, new instruments. That's not American science, you know, dedicating itself or part of itself to a major study.

Now, I've seen this three times in my now long life. I've seen it first with the moon shot, gave the moon exploration. I can remember sitting in my

living room back in New Jersey, you know, in the 60s with my two little kids and my wife watching somebody walk on the moon, on TV, on prime time. Everybody around the world was watching

this. And where is it now? I mean, we went there. There were, what, 11 missions to the moon, man missions of the United States where we have the TV.

It was on TV on prime time. And then for 50 years, nothing happened. So nothing happened because Congress said, we're not ready, the

technology is not ready, which is probably true, but we can, we could have developed better technology back then, you know, the rockets, you know, until SpaceX, we didn't have a rocket that could go back to them.

And SpaceX is only about 20% more powerful than the Saturn 5 that we had back then in the early 70s. 20%. I mean, in

science and in Silicon Valley terms, I can tell you, in venture capital terms, 20% better in 50 years doesn't do it. It's a failure. It's a failure of technology.

It's not great technology. Now, we're going to go back to the moon with, you know, better prepared with better medical support, better training, better everything.

So yes, it will be safer. Although, you know, we've lost a rocket recently, you know, that should have worked and didn't work. So we know the technology is not 100% reliable

yet. Okay. So it took, it went dead for 50 years. Second example, the internet.

People are being told, you know, look at the web, you know, anybody can use a web. We invented it, you know, around the year 2000.

Well, you know, I've worked with people who invented the ARPANET. The, the man who really invented the ARPANET is not well known. He was at the Ren Corporation.

He had the vision of the network of a network that was where you could, you could have, you know, packets that could go everywhere. And that was essentially indestructible, you couldn't stop the

network. And he did it both for commercial reasons, which people don't understand still today. And for military reasons, he did it under the Ren Corporation, which was a research and development

branch of the U.S. Air Force at the time. Nobody paid attention. It took him four years to get the Pentagon to dedicate a small amount of money

to build what was the ARPANET, which was an experiment. I worked with him. His name was Paul Barrett, B-A-R-A-N.

And he is the real grandfather of all of everything we use today, which was packet technology, which was pure genius. When the French put together a national network, they

ignored it completely. They didn't have packets. So they built a network that didn't survive. And the Internet just took over worldwide.

Because it was based on packet switching. I worked with Paul Barrett on one of his projects. He was my

mentor in computer science. I then became one of the principal investigators for ARPANET, the Department of Defense. We built the first computer

conferences on the network and turned it into a commercial facility, which everybody has forgotten. But good software gets forgotten, because good software plunges in the depth of the machine

and people don't see it. If it's really good software, people shouldn't know it's there. It should be reliable. You

shouldn't have to mess with it. So that's a kind of software we built. And then the ARPANET died, just like going to the Moon project died for about 50 years, as far as the public was concerned.

Again, the budget for ARPA, the Pentagon said, well, we've proved it. We can use it. We don't need to continue paying for it. And it died. It was picked

up by the National Science Foundation, which is a public unclassified science agency funded by the US government, but not by the Pentagon. It's a major funding agency for science, for astronomy, for biology,

for all kinds of research and material science and everything else. Mathematics is funded by NSF. And the NSF picked it up for one reason, that it saved money in linking together different universities that were doing the same research.

So why buy computers for every one of them, when you could have a network where you could network over computers together, and then you didn't need to build more computers. That was pure genius.

They got the idea that this was the engine that could revolutionize American science. And they did it without telling anybody. They just

started funding a number of facilities around the country. And that was the internet. It was a mistake at the beginning, because there were

many different internets. Finally, they got the idea, we need to have just one massive internet. And that worked. And then the public only became

aware of it about 1996, 1997, when the web was invented. And the web was not invented in America. It was invented in Switzerland by a very, very bright young computer scientist, who just hacked up together the

piece of software that everybody could use. And he said, here, you know, see if you like this. And everybody loved it the first day, and that became the web.

Okay. But it wasn't done with American dollars. So that's the that's the history that I think all the people using the web today have absolutely no idea how it came about.

I had the privilege of living through that. But there was a period of 50 years when nothing happened. And we're doing the same thing with UFOs today.

You know, there was good research on UFOs 50 years ago. I think the research that Battelle was doing in 1954 was that, you know, was a high water mark. The next high water mark is what Bob Bigelow and

our team did that resulted in Haiti, that became public, because of Mr. Mellon, and because of the Israeli zone, though, you know, bringing it to before Congress and bringing it in Washington,

you know, reviving the idea and showing how it could be done. The project itself died. And all the work that we've done died with it. And somebody will revive it again, just like, you

know, the moon shot was revived by Elon Musk, you know, not by Congress. And, you know, just like things, somehow, even in this area of high technology, things have to die for 50 years before the

public can really benefit from it. Given that history, it makes me think about the field of parapsychology. And I know you've been somewhat

aligned with that field as well, because I got my doctoral degree in 1980. And throughout the 1970s, seemed to be a period in which we all expected enormous progress.

The work in remote viewing was very, very promising. And yet, while the internet has achieved its full potential or close to it, parapsychology has yet to do so, like the field

of UFO research. And we demonstrated 10 years ago, 20 years ago, that the internet was the ideal tool as a technological base to conduct sophisticated scientific remote viewing experiments.

And that has really never been exploited to the scale where it could be. And it's, it's a resource, it's free. I mean, you don't need it.

You know, you don't need to write a grant application to use the internet. It's, it's, you know, it's in my phone. You know, it's free.

And, and we still have to do, still have to go through that. It's one more revolution that should be coming. Well, Jacques, it's been a real pleasure to have this conversation with you and to have a

sense of where we stand today in these important areas of research. Many people would say nothing could be more important than understanding the mystery that UFOs represent.

I tend to think the mystery of parapsychology is probably equally important and probably related. But in any case, I want to thank you so much for spending this time with

me and with the viewers of New Thinking Allowed. And I'm hopeful that we can have many more conversations. It would be my pleasure. Thank you

very much. Well, thank you for being with me. And for those of you watching or listening, thank you for being with us. Thank you.

Thank you.