Jacques Vallée had a UFO encounter when he was 15 | JRE

Transcript

or you a person like yourself that's been very brave for all these years because you were talking about this stuff in the 1960s which is pretty crazy well um you know I had seen essentially Flying Saucer when I was 15 so can you describe it I was in uh I I grew up in a little in a town that's uh about 45 minutes out of Paris uh on the road to Normandy and uh my father was a judge in that in that town for a while and uh beautiful afternoon in in the summer I don't know the exact date it would have been late June or July um 55 1955 um so I was about 15 16 uh I was still in school and then the following year I was going to go to the university and the my my mother called called me I was working with my father who was relaxing doing some furniture uh and I was helping him and I heard my my mother call from the yard and I went down and saw an object that was absolutely a sorcerer it looked like it was over the steeple of the the there's a a cathedral there and we were know about half a kilometer away from it and it was just suspended it was silver and there was a clear Dome on top of it and we both saw that uh it was very clear um and then the next day I asked a friend of mine from school who was you know we were the the the two good students in physics and so on uh and I I told him I had seen that and he said he had looked at it with binoculars he had seen it too and he had looked at it with binoculars and I got him to draw it and he drew exactly what I had seen essentially a lens shaped thing with a a dome on a clear Dome on top how long did you see it for um I saw it for less than a minute I think I went inside I don't remember what I did um I logically I probably went inside to get my father so that he could he could see it and then when he came out it was gone U he well he didn't even come out he said it was probably one of the new the new planes that were flying around because this was a time when the the meteors and you know the early Jets were being tried and they were training Pilots with them and so on and both for civil aviation and for for the Air Force in France so um he said well let's wait you know maybe this will be disclosed at some point so I didn't say anything about it also you know the son of a judge uh family of a judge isn't supposed to see strange things in in the air over the town and right so it was sensitive um what year was this you when you were 15 how old do you now it it was 1955 1955 so back then it was 1516 okay so we could also apply that like if it was a jet it would probably be very loud well and also it wouldn't just stand there right it wouldn't be able to just sit there was this thing quiet after that you know it I I understood that it was after that I worked at Paris Observatory after I had my degree in astronomy tracking satellites we track the very early satellites and uh we were government you know office so people were writing to us with what they had seen and most of it we could explain for one thing they were seeing Echo and they was seeing some of the Russian Rockets you know and um so we would write back I mean we had to write back you know to French citizen uh I had a card with a French flag on it and you know we were we were serving the the population so we would explain those things pretty much the way they do now you know you've seen the moon rising through the fog or you've seen satellite you know so much Alpha 23 and but then there were cases where just like that where they they they saw something we could not explain but then we would tell them but we wouldn't publish it we wouldn't send it anywhere for one thing it wasn't our job you know our job was tracking satellites right but that one experience that you had when you were 15 is what ignited your interest in this for so many years yeah well if you hadn't been doing I mean the the the thing that's very important about people like yourself is that you're so careful in how you document these things and in the conclusions that you draw because I think this field of UFO study is filled with so many people that claim to have answers claim to know things and this is going to happen and this is coming and this is this is disclosure is imminent and this and that's not it never comes true it's always just you're just left waiting for some new evidence that supposedly they have and this is the more frustrating aspects of it like when talking to Christopher melon he's telling me there's high resolution photographs and video and how about showing me show show me some stuff show me something because as a person that had I wasn't when I was 15 I didn't see anything so I don't have that experience that you have I just have this fascination with it but also tempered by a little bit of cynicism because there's so much Malarkey that's attached to this subject well and and some of it is you know some of it is legitimate yeah and I think ethologists in general you know they want disclosure disclosure disclosure but we don't know uh you know I'm very respectful of you know when I had clearances uh I was just very respectful of those clearances because there are people who know what's on the other side of that