Jacques Vallée, Ph.D. on the UFO Phenomenon being a Genuine Scientific Problem

Transcript

[Music] we got it down to one one Buton that I need to push so we're in good we're in good shape thank you um it's um it's wonderful to see that science can uh come to grips with problems like this um you just have to wait 65 years which is um what happened to me you can see the my my hair was a different color at the beginning uh it's always um a bit nostalgic for me to come back to the farm here um I spent nearly four years on on this campus first in the computation Center uh which was a couple of years ahead of IBM in system development and later at The Institute for Plasma Research um under Professor Peter sturak developing models of the solar Corona uh palsar energy and unidentified flying objects the year was 1972 and it was already clear at least to us that these three Cosmic subjects had a a lot in common I have four things to say here you see uh President Clinton having a private talk with his science advisor uh from 93 to 98 Professor Jack Gibbons an astrophysicist and atomist specialized in the structure of the Sun and energy conservation which is what got him the job he held this prestigious position at the time when Mr Lawrence Rockefeller well-known supporter of American Science and the environment strongly suggested to President Clinton to remove the secrecy and the stigma that surrounded the UFO issue in the US the problem was a scientific one but it was mainly political and as we all know the secret was not lifted in February 94 I had the opportunity to Listen to Professor Gibbons at the annual meeting of the American Association for the advancement of Science in this city in San Francisco where I was part of a panel about the use of computer networking and the management of crisis in industrial and environmental issues he uh presented Dr Gibbons presented the keynote address and gracefully two questions afterwards um of course uh someone from the audience asked him how do you advise the president of the United States when Mr rockerfeller wants him to reveal once and for all the reality of unexplained objects in the planet's neighborhood there were a few laughs in the audience followed by deep and Silent expectation Dr Gibbons picked up the mic and said he could not answer in place of the white house but he could tell a short story that would summarize his personal situation and I'll mention that because it's now our personal situation here it's about an older man who is tired and goes home one evening in the grass along the way he detects an unusual light as he gets closer he discovers a frog with the odd detail that it wears a little lighted Golden Crown so he's intrigued by that Discovery and he picks up the Frog and he's about to put it in his pocket when it starts talking to him the Frog this was at a Triple A in s Francisco in front of all the scientists in in the Bay Area okay so the Frog explains that in reality she is a young very wealthy princess changed into a frog by a mean magician and all he has to do is to kiss her she will become human again they will live together in happiness and they will have many wonderful children the old man pund the situation seriously for a while and then he puts her in his pocket saying at my age I'd rather have a talking [Laughter] frog that's funny but it's also the most clear explanation I've ever heard at the highest level regarding the historical status of the UFO problem in the United States remember this is the advisor the science advisor to to the president second thing I have to mention is um when I joined this wonderful campus uh I I was hired to develop a generalized database system for the campus and medical school and I took the opportunity since I had the computer to Implement cataloges of unexplained UFO cases again this was 1973 and we developed a screen to separate the most interesting cases from those that were likely to be explainable which is the first thing you do in science you clean up the data um here by the way You' see some of the pioneers of this uh discipline uh from left to right Dr James Harder University of California Berkeley Dr Richard Haynes of NASA Mr Brad Sparks an individual researcher uh myself with black hair um Dr Bruce makabe from the US Navy and uh Professor sturak who is still very much alive and lives here in in uh in pal Alto and he was again the first man who initiated UFO research at Stanford at the time the um French space agency the cnes which by the way is the third wealthiest space agency in the world they own the Kuru base in uh on the Equator so they are the only ones who can launch from the equator which is obviously a big advantage in launching satellites especially heavy satellites they launched the cap telescope from Kuru um so the cnes had had an interest in the same issue and they were talking about a useful sample after cleaning the data of uh 5% to 10% of the cases the remaining ones being explained are too poor in um in terms of information content as we all know thanks to thanks to the efforts of the cnes the percentage has now fallen to 2% of the data that's valuable data for scientists um after deeper analysis of exceptional Optical effects um observation errors and the influence of witness imagination back here in California our little group um included a a retired army officer about 1943 he told us he used to be in charge um of surveying and detecting German submarines along the northeast coast of the United States in the general area of Massachusetts his unit had studied the complexity of statistics and he strongly disagreed with us he strongly stated that ethologist had the problem backward in his position if 2% of the reported cases turned out to be German Subs the situation was very serious indeed for the United States therefore he encouraged me to apply to UFOs the same discipline that the Army had applied to the detection of enomy periscopes in the waves of the North Atlantic that changed a lot of things for me he told me something like this you're doing scientific research therefore if you have explained 98% of the reports you're happy um they all Co cost the same amount pretty much and you believe you solve the problem and if you remember from many years during Project Blue Book the Air Force was sending report to Congress saying again this year we have explained all but 2% of all the reports coming from the American people and everybody applauded and everybody went back to doing something else he said my own job was Intelligence my problem was exactly the reverse of yours the 98% EXP cleanable cases have probably been given to me by the enemy and they all cost the same the remaining 2% could kill me and they will cost a lot more and detecting them you know is going to be difficult that's where we are I never forgot that lesson When government services announced today that the great majority of of the reports are explained as we saw recently from before Congress that simply means for an information guy like me that the input is very poorly controlled what's important is the remaining 2% my third thing I need to get into is this in the day when Madame curri was trying to characterize the Unexplained radiation sources within pitch blend which is a completely uninteresting material she only obtained one tenth of a gram of radium chloride for several tons of raw material tons the 10th of gr became her second novel prize this scientific and strategic issue posed by UFOs cannot be left unanswered indefinitely not only are ordinary citizens reporting personal observations with increasingly precise parameters but since the last few years defense Services have been equipped with modern systems that enable correlations as we saw before between space the atmosphere and the surface of our planet that constitutes a new situation it's no longer possible to speculate about hypothetical Illusions errors or hallucinations back in France the services of the cnes um can now correlate witness observations with precise weather measurements at the time data from the military space space observations and and local airports which are now equipped with air pretty interesting atmospheric monitoring system the same is true in the us as we saw in an impressive number of measurements by aircraft equipped with electronic and Optical detectors invisible and infrared light these observations lasted dozens of minutes and hours allowing very precise data Gathering let me get to my last section and this the only one that has a a curve uh a graph so after all this is Stanford I have to have at least one graph you know after what Dr Nolan showed you know was kind of overwhelming so this is not overwhelming but it's interesting why is it uh that the phenomenon remains so mysterious 65 years for much of the public and even for the Pentagon um I'm I'm not breaching any security here but I'm pretty sure that the Pentagon has no idea what's really going on at the big at at the scale that we're addressing here um the answer Li in a very statistical effect that you can see here that's very often neglected um the graph can be read in the following way the probability that an observer will be motivated after to get to get a report somebody has to have a motivation to send a report to you okay we assume people will always do that because they want their name in the paper and so on that's not true and um the the probability that the Observer is going to be motivated to send this report depends on the strangeness of the experience which is the horizontal scale here and this is somewhat arbitrary I mean admittedly I made it up but uh it's you know it will correlate with your data if you if you try you may have a different scale um the strangeness is defined a graph represented with two steep hills not one there isn't one distribution there are at least two distributions which is a mistake that we're making when we go testify before Congress there are two different distributions and they are very very very different in strangeness category one the witness may have observed an unusual light in the sky or at at a ground level which behaved in some curious way it's unlikely they would call authorities but the sighting may become known especially very is an unusual physiological reaction at the same time or some other incident you would find those in the files of the Air Force uh which I spent four years going through one by one in the old days uh in Stranges category two the object is better defined like a luminous body with complex shapes or displacement uh We've mentioned some of them you know this morning or a sphere in the sky that appears to fly Against the Wind um sometimes it's a definite silent steady light that was extinguished suddenly and therefore couldn't have been an artificial satellite well um those cases go to official organizations that are trusted I've assumed that maybe three people out of 10 would report something if it was in some ways touching them personally for for example if they had some reaction to it uh in my early days at Paris Observatory we were responsible as public servants for answering and trying to explain reports that the French people were sending us um and we had to do that because artificial satellites were going to be very important and there was a a tremendous education program to do with the population many people thought it was uh uh Soviet propaganda and there was no such thing me you look at the sky you don't see a satellite most of the time um so we uh we were assigned during the day during the night we would observe and during the day we would answer letters from people uh um and um uh some of those remained unexplained the the satellite that dis disappears right in the middle of the sky is simply because it went into the the the shade of the earth know the cone of of the shade of the earth people don't know that so they see a light that goes like this and po it disappears which seems mysterious uh those things are explainable and people are very grateful when you explain that um Everything Changes in category three the motivation is urgent people will call the Air Force they will call the army they will call the the police uh like an orange Globe has followed your car on some isolated Road a luminous object like an airplane on fire seems to have crashed behind the next Hill um the life has been diving on an isolated car and the engine died at the same time a flotilla of Lights has slowly slowly crossed the sky leaving a trail or a flying cylinder With No Wings has buzzed somebody's aircraft carrier the public is troubled by these observations so are the people on the aircraft carrier uh which don't have an immediate explanation we find them in police reports and in previous cases they may be explainable but they fill the official files and often end up in the records of concerned agency like the CNAs in France or a local Airbase in the US or now the Pentagon if any uh they some fall to civilian Services uh military unit on radar stations investigators review the data talk to Pilots talk to technical U organizations in the area so that's the Black Hill you see a report number one report number two report number three so on if an object overcomes a car and lands on the road ahead of you and then takes off again we're in strangeness category 4 the report May not go to the Air Force it might go to the local police probably um and in many cases it goes to a local journalist you know or to an independent researcher or in most cases there is no report because you're afraid that people will make fun of you or the reputation of your company will be you know you would be surprised the number of CEOs within 10 months of Stanford um you know who know me as a venture capitalist have come to me to talk to me about something like this was never reported in strous Category 5 um everything becomes even more scary the probability of any official report is almost zero perhaps a creature has come out of the object that was in front of your car perhaps a witness is felt a form of communication with whatever it was or even a physiological reaction ction such as temporary paralysis we have many cases of that hundreds such cases have filled my files over the years and I don't need permission of Congress to study them I just call the guy and you know if I'm lucky gives me a cup of coffee and and we talk about his experience I mean there is no official anything experienced ethologist will tell you there's a category six six and a category seven the red curve again that are very seldom considered by the police the army or the serious news organizations uh because um they are weird and they're also high in number and rich in content no witness wants to be exposed as a crazy person by some scientist journalist or law officer yet these reports are often correlated to physical observations that are quite real category 7 one would Place reports of what people have called deductions for lack of a better term and the probability of an official report is very low one is back to what sociologist Pierre lrange in France has called the rumor there is a rumor about these things it's difficult to pinpoint specific cases and even that assumes that the unconscious mind has reported it to the conscious mind and hypnosis is not going to get you there contrary to what my friends in euphology believe so there are two conclusions that can be drawn from our curve with the two hills a current analysis methods are insufficient even blind before most of the reports and those reports themselves derive from an unknown and large number of observations by the public because this is out of 10 observations and I've just estimated the height of the curve that is a report be military analysis are highly relevant they teach us a lot but only in a minority of sightings in the United States namely the classic cases available to very specialized equipment like aboard limits or the ship that followed the limits when we're told that 2% or 3% of the cases remain un explained after serious study you must relate these figures to the estimated number of observations that were not reported and you have to ask why were they not reported how many are there the official services do work on an important sample but it's limited by severe selection parameters which restrict the scope of their conclusions a situation which is well understood by modern science in practice in medicine for example you would never release a new drug that had only been tested on a small statistical sample in one country I see a serious danger in any future response to the phenomenon based on media Revelations or on a social disclosure attempt there are many definitions of disclosure that would present it as a grave and present danger without due attention to the more subtle categories in our data space it it has to be a danger if you are looking for fun from the military I mean that's what they deal with if it's not dangerous they'll cut your funding which is which occasionally happens to us uh it is true that uh we suffer from almost a century of neglect and ignorance but this um will not be uh correlated by or corrected by overreacting to the present or potential danger that our own ignorance has created nor will it be corrected by simply dumping all the files into some AI engine uh my PhD is in AI 1968 Northwestern uh AI has been along all all the time it's in factories it's in your car it's everywhere what the AI that people are talking about now is the latest the latest version uh of of AI which is which faces the public everything else works I mean uh but it doesn't work on files where you cannot even Define what the problem is we need to do we need to apply AI at the at the level where we have already done serious investigation with boots on the ground to clean up the sample the real solution lies in the more subtle data categories those we have neglected all along five six and seven and in the future um that's where I want to spend most of my time in conclusion uh trying to separate science from the evolution of society has always been a fudal exercise early in this presentation we noted that the probability of a UFO or UAP maybe report varied with strangeness it's highest when the case is clearly abnormal and observed under good conditions but doesn't threaten the witness's emotional stability in contrast the strange observations those of their Highest Potential scientific interest only reach official Services by accident and I are difficult to analyze and poorly socialized we don't have a good enough picture of their Global characteristics we know the us we know France you know what do we know about India what do we know about Afghanistan we don't have a good enough picture and we cannot obtain it by looking at the official records secret or not among concerned Services military authorities are in a position that is better defined but more isolated from the deeper social reality their equipment provides the best quality of technical data but it only addresses specific domains that don't reveal the global picture that we need in particular they treat any anomaly as a Potential Threat to be extinguished rather than an opportunity to be observed analyzed and recorded the Ron Corporation wrote a very interesting memo which was not classifi to the US Navy after the episode of the limits and I will paraphrase what they said they said do not ascribe to our infrared cameras what they what they cannot tell you everybody has assumed those were photographs those are not photographs those are a detection of a heat resp PS okay it's those are infrared cameras they are very large under the wing of the aircraft and they are they can track uh the target what you bought from us was a specific system that you asked for as to develop that records a heat signature of the engines of an enemy airplane you're going to attack we didn't sell you a UFO detector okay that's right on writing to the O the real danger lies in the lack of a wider research program one fun more fundamental and more accessible addressing the life sciences and social realities as well as physical performance and Military threats beyond the justifiable protection of of a few secret projects the time has come for major countries not just one to open the real files widely to the scientific Community thank [Applause] you