Jacques Vallee and Chris Aubeck Want You to Give Them $42,000 to Revise "Wonders in the Sky"10/2/2015
When I launched my campaign to raise money to help me afford to keep my website running, I received a great deal of pushback, largely from fringe believers, who found it déclassé to speak of money or who took the capitalist line that any project that isn’t profitable is necessarily worthless. Since then, Scott Roberts and John Ward have launched a crowdfunding campaign asking for $50,000 to fund their fringe history business startup, and now the latest entry in the field is the team of Jacques Vallée and Chris Aubeck, who launched an IndieGoGo campaign looking for $42,000 to publish 500 copies of a revised deluxe edition of Wonders in the Sky (2009), their demonstrably false and generally quite unreliable anthology of badly translated and frequently fictitious documents recording premodern UFO sightings.
Let me say that again: $42,000 for 500 copies. That’s $84 per copy, for a book they are selling for $200 per copy. I have no idea what printer they are using, and clearly they are going top of the line on everything, but as someone who has assembled books myself, I’m quite sure a decent product could be had at much lower cost. I can have a hardcover, slip-cased full-color interior book printed for probably less than $50 a copy. Presumably they need the money to purchase a full 500-book print run up front rather than use print-on-demand technology, and I will guess (though I of course do not know) that they had to employ people to lay out and design the book, things I do for myself for free.
“We need to get your help to bring this volume to light,” Vallée said, “and I hope you’ll make a contribution.” What I’d like to point out, though, is a basic fact: Jacques Vallée is a very wealthy man. He is a venture capitalist, and according to Bloomberg.com, he is a general partner in SBV Ventures, a firm that operates more than 70 companies and has vast real estate holdings. He is also the managing partner of Runway Capital Partners LLC, a general partner of Astrolabe Ventures, and a partner at Red Planet Capital, a firm he founded in 2006. He sits on at least three corporate boards of directors. And here he is asking his fans to give him cash to print a book, money that someone in his position ought to simply have sitting in the petty cash drawer. (And if he doesn’t, his business ventures are not at all what he claims they are!) In terms of the content of the book, two things stand out: First, the authors claim that they want to present this material “to the scientific community” and yet are printing only 500 copies, which will not be available in libraries or research institutions. Second, my criticisms of the earlier version of the book did not go unnoticed. Get a load of these lines: New cases have been researched and appear in this work for the first time (Penguin produced a paperback version in 2010). Meanwhile other cases have been expanded following further investigation, and some cases from the original work have been removed as additional research proved that they lacked merit.
More than a little of that would be my additional research, which Chris Aubeck confirmed to me months ago. In fact, just to make that perfectly clear I would like to quote Aubeck’s exact words to me from May 17 of this year: “Despite your reactions to the first version of Wonders in the Sky, which I have found extremely useful while making a totally revised 2nd edition (thank you!), I believe you and I share a common goal.” This generated not a dollar from our very wealthy author Jacques Vallée, who is nevertheless happy to use my criticism for free to revise his book and then ask his fans to pay him to print a version of the text saved from embarrassing error by my labor. This upsets me a bit. If they were producing genuine scholarship for modest returns, then I’d say I was simply contributing to the furthering of knowledge. But to ask for $42,000 to publish a deluxe edition revised against my criticism on which everyone profits but me just rubs me the wrong way.
What readers ought to be asking is this: Why should they believe the authors when they say that this time they have produced the best, most scientific, and most accurate version of the book possible when they admit that the first one was filled with errors and omissions?
16 Comments
Only Me
10/2/2015 02:59:58 pm
I think you're missing some of the post. There's nothing after the line "Get a load of these lines from the funding page:".
Reply
10/2/2015 03:12:13 pm
No, the coding got screwed up. When I put the video code in, it made some of the paragraphs slide out of order. I think I got them back the right way now.
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Only Me
10/2/2015 03:43:06 pm
I see what you mean. It reads much better now. Thanks!
Clete
10/2/2015 05:22:00 pm
If Scott Roberts and "Doctor" John Ward need seed money to fund their new business startup, why don't they ask Scott Wolter for it? I'm sure by now, he has probably uncovered the hidden Templar treasure buried by William (Billy the Kid) Kidd. I'm sure he would be willing to share.
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tm
10/2/2015 05:57:07 pm
Wolter did find the treasure, but the price of lead has plummeted recently. :)
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Scotty Roberts' Doppleganger
10/3/2015 10:56:23 am
I think Scotty Roberts and John Ward are against the ropes financially. The recent cancelling of their symposium, the begging for money no bank would lend them (for damn good reason), all point to a lack of real interest in their fringe stupidity.
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Scotty Roberts Hat
10/3/2015 01:53:39 pm
The Paradigm Symposium has a history of ineptitude. For two years in a row they've shit canned their big name speaker at the last minute having sold tickets on their good names, of course. Von Daniken was very vocal about this last year and other speakers have also talked about their treatment at the event and have openly accused the pair of using bigger names simply to peddle their own products and names. Last years Symposium apparently began with them playing their own sizzle reel, much to the bemusement of attendees and speakers alike. These guys are an unrivaled joke, even to the fringe community. Finally, reading the gofundme; No. It's not intellectual property. You create plenty of products. It's just as your bank manager rightly identified, you are not a viable business. Go get real jobs and stop sponging.
Scotty Roberts' Doppleganger
10/3/2015 05:14:49 pm
"The Paradigm Symposium has a history of ineptitude. For two years in a row they've shit canned their big name speaker at the last minute having sold tickets on their good names, of course."
Bleep
10/3/2015 05:32:38 pm
Looking at the gofundme page, looks like Micah Hanks is involved in the scam as well.
Shane Sullivan
10/2/2015 06:23:17 pm
Everytime I read the title "Wonders in the Sky", I think of Tetsuo Sakurai's "Wonderland in the Sky":
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Andy White
10/2/2015 08:19:13 pm
I think of "Butterfly in the Sky" from Reading Rainbow.
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Shane Sullivan
10/2/2015 10:27:31 pm
A UFO can fly twice as high!
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David Bradbury
10/3/2015 08:58:21 am
"they had to employ people to lay out and design the book, things I do for myself for free."
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The troll Krampus
10/3/2015 10:47:03 am
So it would seem these fringe pushers are indeed dis-honest dog turds. When I was in school if someone like them wronged me I fed them a knuckle-sandwich. I did my best to do it away from school as to avoid being suspended and such. They usually got the message.
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10/7/2015 07:02:21 am
Thanks for sharing this useful information with us, I appreciate the work done here by you.
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AuthorI am an author and researcher focusing on pop culture, science, and history. Bylines: New Republic, Esquire, Slate, etc. There's more about me in the About Jason tab. Newsletters
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