A Forgotten UAP Event and Its Ramifications for the Science of the Phenomenon, with Jacques Vallée

Transcript

the 2025 Soul Foundation Symposium. Good afternoon. Um, as most of you know, um, about 15 years ago, there was a large project in Las Vegas funded by the defense department. And within that um program um I helped develop a data warehouse of about 260,000 unexplained cases. Most of them at the beginning from my files based on files of other people and my own research that I had started to reformat into a single format so that we can we could begin to do uh AI to put an AI level on top of it.

That did not happen. um and the um but there were uh some exceptional cases within that. So for the last 15 years I have been reooking at those cases to uh in in a different in a different way with a different set of of lenses to look at truly exceptional cases that were either exceptions or validations of things that were in advance of our current ideas about what the phenomena was like so um I'm going to talk about just one case from beginning to end um and then show you so it's going to be essentially physics physics that you could present in high school today from again from beginning to end but then as you'll see it will lead to some ideas for the future that have some interest. So at at the outset I feel obligated to apologize for such a simple story compared to some of the other things that you've heard. There is no alien in my talk.

There is no abduction. There isn't even any hanky panky by the air force or anybody else in the government and it's not classified. It was never classified and you've probably never heard of it. We um together with Mr. Luke Denny and uh the Cha Meshski in in France in the same group um and the uh the college of experts of Sigma 2.

We um submitted our research on this case to progress in aerospace sciences and it was published earlier this year. So I'm not going to go through all the details. All the details and the formulas have already been published. We're very proud of being accepted by that review because it is the dominant it is the number one review in essentially aerospace in the world today and that had really never been done except for one other case that Dr. Nolan and I had published before which had also been pretty much unknown before.

In terms of academic consideration, this is mainstream physics. We have the essential data. It was published early. The case took place in 1966 and the it has been studied and I'll will go through very quickly through the history of how it was studied at the time and then the conclusions were reviewed by the American Academy of Sciences in an official report that nobody has read. And there are good reasons for that.

And there are sociological reasons, not scientific reasons. And here we beginning to see the the the true components of why we're here. the there is no other case uh with the kind of credentials that I'm going to show you in the history of eupfology. The skeptics have given up a long time ago. I mean they wouldn't go after me or after the scientists involved.

they would have to go after the academ of sciences of the United States of America and so far they haven't done that. So uh to explore the the question and to reopen the case in a new direction we've assembled a small team in France and I'm very grateful to you look for u what what you were able to to bring into the into the research to do an updated an updated study because there have been new information. There has been new information along the way. So this is essentially the nucleus of the team in France. This is at the um at the aviation uh museum in Paris.

Um the uh the case um is old again 1966. So uh I I mentioned it on the internet and uh there was in three different conferences about UFOs and nobody followed up. There were a couple of people with questions. Nobody followed up because who cares? We want to chase ambulances today. Okay.

We want to know what's what's happening with the latest light in the sky or latest picture of something for which there is essentially no information that of a scientific value but there could be. Um so the case is old but um the conclusions have been in print widely in the United States again since 1970 and they are becoming important for us again in the current climate. So this uh symposium of soul here in Italy um demonstrates that we're at the beginning of a completely new phase with new tools and these new tools um have been inspired by the late professor Peter Stur at Stanford University and pursued now by uh Dr. Noland and and and his team and by Dr. Kevin Kof at Colombia University and by the Sigma 2 uh commission in France.

So um there are now several large organizations that are harnessed to the solution of this problem. I have one hour uh less than an hour. Uh my presentation will be in two parts. I will go quickly through the case itself as it stands and then uh uh the the current assessment of it and then after that we'll consider with you the the implications and take your questions about the and I will bring in some questions of my own that I've had all along since uh I have the the opportunity to to to do that. The major facts of the case are on record.

So there is very little left to the imagination as you will see. I first heard of uh the case when I was at Northwestern University uh near Chicago early in ' 67. I was finishing a doctorate in AI. Yes, AI goes back to you know the the the mid60s uh between the observatory and the computation center. I also worked for Dr.

Heck cleaning up the Blue Book files and um Blue Book was a complex thing, but they were reporting uh to Congress and the question was what happens if Congress raises questions about the statistics that we're giving them? because they were saying that essentially the problem was could be explained if you give us a little bit more money we'll go explain the last 2% of the data that isn't clear and they uh realized that from our research that uh that wouldn't work very very long so uh Dr. HK and I had spent three days that I will never forget at Wright Patterson Air Force Base meeting with the team from Blue Book. Um, Captain at the time and later Major Hector Quintanillaa and his uh staff, his officers and the people supporting him. Um, the foreign technology division at right path is is is an impressive place. Um and then as a result of that they agreed to give us a very small contract to give me a very small contract to work with u the files and they would send me in to Chicago uh every month a bundle of current files from the last month or two and I would go through that and I would check their interpretation of the file and then if there was something that I disagree with, we would discuss how they should be class uh not classified.

None of the files were classified contrary to what you read every day in UFO books or blue book files were never classified. There were a few dozen cases that were classified because of the location or the instruments being used, but not about the UFO itself. Um so I began studying the documents month by month by month. I I read everything and occasionally I consulted colleagues about way the the the w the witnesses. The um UFO research is like the uh real estate business.

the the three major components are location, location, and location. And it's like buying a house. Um the location here is um close to the border, just just north of a border between Louisiana and Arkansas. And um the um the closest town is Hannesville, Louisiana, but the witnesses were in a car uh just north of the state line in Arkansas. The only significant cities around are Shriport to the southwest and Texana in the northwest each about 40 miles away.

Uh, and the site is about a 100 miles souths southwest of Little Rock, Arkansas. The date was December 10, 1966. So, this is not like the cases you hear about on television that somebody thinks that they know somebody who saw something last month. And so we we we have the data and as you'll see we have the data with high precision all the way along which is not a common experience with UFOs. There was a family of four in a car.

They were driving north at about 20 uh 20 hours and 30 minutes CST at a location, 1200 yards west of Highway 79, 3.6 miles north of Hanesville, about one mile north of the border with Arkansas. And you have a red spot at the location. The weather was bad. So this again, this is not your, you know, popular UFO case. Uh they were not in an F18 chasing something.

Uh there was no radar coverage. They were in a very large forest. It was raining. The weather was bad. The temperature was barely above freezing.

You could see a few miles in every direction, but it was raining softly with limited visibility. Um, you can see why the case has been of no interest by any TV network ever since ever since 1966. The scene is very ordinary and dull. What impressed me was the precision of the details when I read the the thing that the air force has sent me. Um the witnesses had seen an intense light in the forest under the rain pulsating from white to orange.

It appeared to be over a mile away from them. Yet it was intense. And um they the the driver after stopping to evaluate the situation started the car again and drove away to keep his family safe. He was just afraid of of what it was. reported the case to the air force immediately and um they spoke to him but they thought it was just a light and after all it wasn't flying so it was not technically a UFO it would be a UAP today but in those days it wasn't technically a UFO so they didn't do much with it um I read the the file.

I got a map like this. Found that the site was a very large industrial forest owned by the Wirehouser Corporation and um for the wood business of course um and but the exact place wasn't found and it wasn't found for many months. I showed the case um you know the the other cases that they had sent me you know were not very significant and I processed them but then I I thought I would show the case to Dr. Heinneck. This is at Northwestern the astronomy department.

I was some of the programming I was doing was maintaining the bright star catalog for American astronomy and um Dr. Hennis on on the right was one of the American astronauts and the the others were uh professors of astronomy at Northwestern on on the faculty. Um, and I Heck thought, "Yes, I mean, this is a case we should follow up and we should call uh Major Quintonella to get permission to uh reinvestigate the case and call the witness." Um, Major Quintanella agreed and I uh called the the the witness. His name was uh Galloway, Dr. Louie Galloway, age 31.

His wife was 28. They had two children in the car with them. Dr. Galloway turned out to be a physics professor at Centenary College in Shrefport specializing in atomic physics. And he told me that well he he had actually done something that any of us would have done.

He stopped the car and he looked at the distance from his headlights whose power he obviously knew compared to the power of the faraway light. and he found energy in the range of a nuclear power station, which is why he got started the car again and drove his family out of there as fast as he could. That was interesting because Dr. Hinck and I had been the first two scientists asked to testify before the Condan Commission. Dr.

Condan had gotten a million dollars. Actually, that got larger as time went on to re-examine the files of Project Blue Book because the Air Force wanted to get out of the UFO business. And um they were right. I mean, at the time, you know, there was a lot of tension in the world. Uh if you're an Air Force officer, you want to fly a jet somewhere.

You don't want to be stuck behind the desk with um people, I don't know, families calling you about the light in the sky. So, and it wasn't really uh at the time, you know, we wanted the Air Force to continue, of course, because we were getting interesting data, but it was completely justified for the Air Force to want to get out of the business. The problem was uh so we we we called professor Condan who himself as you know um an atomic physicist who had been at Trinity with Dr. Oenheimer at the time of the first atomic bomb. Condan was professor of nuclear physics at the University of Colorado and he got on the phone with the witness following Michael to him and um he became fascinated with the case which is why it is mentioned in the final report of the Condan Commission of the University of Colorado to the Academy of Sciences in the United States.

You haven't read that. You the reason you haven't read that was that the conclusion of Dr. Condan was that there was no big scientific interest in studying UFOs at the time. This was 1968. There were lots of other problems in science that were more pressing.

Um and um however uh the in the appendix to the report there were four pages about this case and I'll go into the what the findings were um because Dr. Condan had um sent um two of his um scientists, both of them, one a PhD in physics, one is in uh psychology to the uh to meet with the witnesses and they confirmed that the sighting was in this very large forest that you can see on on this map. So, um they did extensive follow-up studies uh including aerial surveys. They they sent uh airplanes equipped with um infrared equipment at night to fly over the site. Uh they spent several days with the witnesses looking through the forest trying to find the site.

They didn't find it. Um but Condan um then again followed up with with the help of the air force. The air force got involved again based on on my report to them that this particular case was that they had missed the the analysis of the case and that there was more to it. So everybody started getting involved. uh Dr.

Hinek and I had been the first two scientists to present the history of UFOs to the Condan Commission for two days. So we knew the the participants we knew and I had shared my database of cases which in part came from France and and from Europe with um with the uh Dr. Sanders who was a statistician uh a professional statistician on the staff of the Condan Commission. So we were all friends and we're all working on on on this case. Um they published their conclusions um that the case was unidentified in their report as I said to the academy um the um but the it's only after the the the publication of the of their book that the witnesses were able to find the exact place.

Now once they found the exact place, you could redo the calculations of energy of course with more precision. So they were driving on on the road that you see there US79 and the you can see the distance during which they had the object in view through the forest. not a perfect view because again it was raining and you know there was water in the atmosphere and so um and um in in uh when the investigation went back to the uh to the site they found that there was a railroad there and somebody said well maybe it was a locomotive with a big light and they exaggerated the light Well, that road wirehouser told us that that line hadn't been used for the last 10 years. It was a line to harvest the uh the trees, but it it wasn't used anymore. So um we uh redid with the help of uh Luke Dini and and the commission in in Paris we uh redid some of the calculations.

Um I had also gotten the the weather data and in most UFO cases very people don't know the temperature. They don't know that there are lots of weather details they didn't know. Uh we got data from two different u meteorological stations in one in the state of Arkansas and one in the state of uh um in the state of Louisiana. And these are the every 20 minutes the the the weather conditions at in in the general area. You see it's close to freezing but just above freezing which enabled the the the rain.

You can see here one of the photographs one of the infrared photographs from the the uh the jets that they sent that Condan had sent there. So it's a very complete case that's essentially unknown in the literature. Um the um Condan and Galloway had done the calculations and they disagreed. Uh Professor Condan again who was had been at Trinity found energy twice what the local what Dr. Galloway had found which puts it in the range of a um you know a good size modern nuclear nuclear station.

Um there was a major in the air force who was himself a specialist in atomic physics. As you'd expect, the Air Force would have physicists understood atomic explosions. And he found a number. He did his own calculations. Major Ryan, he found his uh his own calculations in the range.

The the study that was done in Paris found also uh about looked at different hypotheses about the actual geometry of the situation different from what Condan and others had done. And um so we have as of as we stand today, we have a wide range of energies that certainly exceed what you would expect from a small object that was estimated to be about 3 m in diameter. It was again a glowing sphere that was pulsating from orange to white. Okay. during the for minutes for a number a long number of minutes during the uh observation the um the results of uh the team uh and and these are the two models that that we were developed in Paris uh a few months ago.

Um again those those results comparing the light from the headlights to the distance and the light from the object give you those those estimates and our paper which again is is available um goes into the detail of of the calculations and I don't have time to to go into that. So Dr. Condan in his report mentions it and but he says after all it was on the ground and it doesn't qualify as a flying object. What the witnesses later canvased the area and they found four families in the that range of a couple of weeks before and after who had seen exceptional lights of exceptional intensity in the air and moving around there. Of course, I had not reported it.

Most UFO witnesses do not report a UFO for a number of reasons. they're running uh you know a clothing store uh or they are employed by the electrical company or they are a judge somewhere. They're not going to be caught on TV making somebody making fun of them because they've seen this extraordinary light that nobody else has seen. Well, uh they found these four other observations and two of them were very much in the range of their observation and gave gave them again a time illuminosity and so on that was in the range of what they so I won't bore you with those details but it's all again in in our paper. Well um what about the trees? uh you know we're in an industrial forest in a commercial forest.

Um and it's it's all pine trees. I mean there are no no other types of trees. uh they want trees that they can cut and sell to the market for building houses and for um wood chips and for everything else that you can do with wood pulp and everything else. So it's a it's a big industrial operation that's very wellrun. Uh wirehousers all over the world uh you know dealing with wood products.

Um well this happened in a clearing. The clearing was not big that which is why they didn't find it at the beginning. The clearing is uh maybe 10 m wide. All the trees around the clearing had been quote burned by the object. Those are my witnesses.

The trees the the trees were a living organism and they absorbed the radiation. This is not heat. This is radiation and the radiation is written into the b of the tree. Well, Dr. Galloway knew that.

So he collected these um pieces of wood and he sent them to a government laboratory uh to ask them to examine it with their advanced equipment. Uh the government laboratory uh returned the the bark with no comment essentially. Again, I mean, you work for the government. You don't want to be caught dealing with something that may be unexplainable and so on and ruin your career as a government scientist. And this was about the strange light in a forest.

I mean, come on. Um, so I I Dr. Galloway told me that I I asked him if I could have the bark. He said, "Sure." So, um, I've had the bark for a long time. The reason I didn't bring it to a lab is that the the typical analysis would have cut into the wood and um, of course with destruction of some of the potential data in there.

And I I waited until there were techniques that would allow uh the the examination of the wood without destroying the uh the samples. Um the question is can we go back to the forest now and uh again uh you know get more information from the trees. Unfortunately um you know they cut those trees and they sell them. They they take them to the market. This is not a forest for taking your kids for a picnic.

And so you you can see and Paul Heinek was helped me in uh in getting the latest information from way Hower and this is the latest aerial photograph of the of the forest which is obviously closely monitored. And um we cannot go back to the to the site uh now but we do have the the bark um the the logical step and that's where I will end this part is uh further analysis of the bark with extremely fine experiments And uh we've started um talking to um to people who um have um uh experience with that uh um with analyzing um either fabric or uh material that cannot be cut into like the uh the the cloth. from tin the tur and those are the people that I'd like to try to reach and involve in the u uh in the analysis because we you know just like you cannot cut a piece of the the touring shroud u I I'd rather not cut into the samples we have because from the analysis that uh Luke Dini and his team have done at Slay Atomic Center in France. We think that the there is information in layers deposited by the energy inside the tree as the object was pulsing. Remember that the first observation from Dr.

Galloway was that the object was pulsing from white to white to orange. Uh and the the great intensity was when it was white. Now if we can if if we can study those different layers in terms of the energy that was coupled into the bark um then we may learn something more you know about this kind of object. Um but remember from the comparisons um we uh we are dealing with a source of energy in a clearing on a quiet evening uh in Arkansas with an object that's no more than two or three meters in diameter that's developing the energy of um um you or three mile island. How come nobody knows that? Again, and you had four pages in the official report of the Condan Commission to the Academy of Sciences of the United States.

So I think what it takes to do good UFO research is not to chase ambulances but to look carefully at the history going back to the 60s or the 50s. If you have good data and bring that up to the next phase and of course the next phase now is going to be looking at the wood that has been preserved. Okay. There is another good reason for looking at cases before the 70s and it's simply that um after the 70s UFOs started to be used. I mean the consensus certainly in the United States and most other countries was that again the the condent committee had said that there was no big interest for science in a few unexplained lights.

So various agencies started using UFOs as an explanation for their experiments that were classified around the world. So when some farmer somewhere saw something like you know it looked like a disc and it was running it was flying around and maybe it was dropping something uh and or maybe it was crashing and uh the there was a force central recovery. The explanation to that farmer would be, well, it's one of those UFOs, you know, it probably comes from Mars. So, um, a number of us started, that doesn't mean that you shouldn't study UFO cases after 1970. It means that before you study the case, there are a number of hard questions you have to ask about the location.

Who was there? Was there military interest? Was there intelligence interest? Was it at a time of maybe a coup in Moscow somewhere? Um maybe um a revolution in Latin America. Well, could it be connected to something else that was in the news at the time? And then if you find that, you won't know the real answer, but you can you can then approach the case with a different set of questions. Um, before 1970, you can ask just the questions we asked. you know, uh, in this case, we were lucky to have a a witness who was a smart atomic physicist that we could introduce to Condan because Professor Condan had money to study UFOs at the time. So, we took advantage of that coincidence in history to bring you this case.

Now, the questions um and I'm, you know, I'm open to questions, but I have some questions of my own. Um most of you probably think that um project blue book was BS. Essentially, there was another project. Okay, everybody knows that. Everybody's known that for a long time.

There was another project. It was classified. It came from the Robertson panel in 1953. Um, and it it went on and the idea was, you know, the data we get from the public is very inconsistent. You know, we need good data.

So, we're going to do instrumentation beyond and beyond that, we're about to launch satellites in a few years. So uh let's be serious and let's let's bring science and instrumentation into it. And of course it will be done by you know the usual uh companies Battel and Lo and a few others that that we deal with all the time because we have classified contracts with their teams and we trust them and they do advanced physics. So, um, in the meantime, um, you know, the the American population pays taxes and they want to know if they are properly protected. So if they see a light in the forest, they should have a place where they can at least report it and um and have um have a um a chance to if it's if it's new and interesting that somebody's going to go to the site with them and investigate it.

So uh that was project blue book but it was very much shot in the dark. I mean there were yes uh when when I read the statistics of blue book there were immediately 75% of the cases that that could be explained could be explained just by consulting tables of satellites consulting tables of whether uh the moon the major planets and so on. Um however there was a residue and within that residue there were about 5% that could not be readily identified without site investigation and those were the the basis for the database that I was building and I was finding patterns in that database um just like Mik Vayor has has done in in France and continues to do in France with the French databases and people around the world have been doing that and those patterns are repeatable which is what you're looking for in science except that we don't understand what image and what phenomenon they are reporting to us. So this is where we are and the air force both in this case and in the earlier case that Dr. Nolan and I published um which was um a case in the north of the United States.

The Air Force was involved. In fact, in our case, they they gave up on the case, uh, deciding it wasn't one of their aircraft that had caused the uh the the deposit of of metal infusion on a on the park. Uh, metal that we recovered and we've studied in the lab. Um but then they came back later and they said can we get involved in your investigation again and again those were people with labs behind them and with degrees in physics and they were serious just like in this case the air force of course got very interested about the the power of the observation. So, uh, no, Blue Book was not BS.

Uh, uh, Blue Book was a wide ranging survey of what everybody was seeing and reporting. And some of the data was uh, interesting for science. For one thing, they collected data from the Navy, including naval officers reports of objects coming out of the ocean uh that we're talking about here now. So those uh those cases were on record and when I I punched up all those uh cards from Project Blue Book, there were several hundred cases that came from naval officers at sea. So this wasn't just the United States.

This was from the Pacific, the Atlantic, uh you know the uh the North Sea and and and and other places all over the world from naval ships. Okay. So those are the things that from history that we all need to keep in mind as we move forward into this new great era that uh that we have. Thank you very much. [applause]