Diana Pasulka Discusses "Invisible College," "Incredible" Jacques Vallée with Vox

​Earlier this week, Vox magazine’s Sean Illing spoke with Diana Pasulka, the author of American Cosmic, about space aliens and the threat that UFO beliefs are becoming a religion. In the conversation, Pasulka offered this gem of a response to a question about the so-called “Invisible College” of UFO researchers, whose activities have shaped ufology for the better part of the past four decades:

Diana Pasulka
The “Invisible College” is an old idea that comes from the 17th-century British philosopher Francis Bacon, and it was meant to describe the work of scientists that challenged contemporary beliefs of the church.
 
There were two incredible modern scientists, Allen Hynek and Jacques Vallée, who revived the idea. Hynek passed away in 1986, but he’s actually the star character in the History Channel’s show Project Blue Book. Vallée is still here, and he’s an astronomer and a computer scientist who worked on ARPANET, which was the military precursor to the internet.
 
Basically, Hynek and Vallée called themselves the “Invisible College” once they started to believe the things they were investigating were somehow either extraterrestrial or interdimensional. They were part of a group of scientists that were known to each other but were not known to the general public, and who quietly pursued this research on their own time.
 
Sean Illing
That sounds ... weird.

​I think it probably behooves us to note that Pasulka described Hynek and Vallée as “incredible” scientists, even though Hynek never managed to prove UFOs are a distinct and singular non-human intelligent phenomenon, Vallée has a long record of sloppy scholarship, and both men seriously entertained the idea that UFOs are demons or poltergeists haunting us from another dimension. You know, science! It’s also disconcerting that even in discussing the “science” of UFOs, the History Channel pops up like some angry fungus that sprouts on every rotten log.
 
But more to the point is that Pasulka left out key information about this “Invisible College.” Hynek and Vallée worked closely with Hal Puthoff, who for the past forty years has been closely involved with the U.S. government and with defense contractors and now To the Stars Academy of Arts and Science. Vallée himself reported in his Forbidden Science that Puthoff spent years worming his way into the Pentagon in order to convince the government to study demons and poltergeists in flying saucers. And he is still there. As a subcontractor for Robert Bigelow and now with To the Stars, Puthoff has exercised sizeable influence over the government’s UFO research, and he brought Vallée back into the mix by folding Vallée’s study of so-called “metamaterials” into his own efforts to prove that seeming pieces of industrial waste are really broken chunks of flying saucers.
 
The Invisible College of ufology isn’t invisible. It’s Hal Puthoff and his friends, celebrating four decades of pursuing extreme and seemingly nonsensical claims about supernatural UFOs.