Review of Ancient Aliens S20E15: “Jacques Vallée: UFO Pioneer”

I don’t think it’s much of a secret that I don’t really like Jacques Vallée. For most UFO fans, he is an éminence grise whose stature as a philosopher of ufology has made him a respected thinker and eternal consultant for the federal government on UFOs. But, for me, he’s a sloppy scholar who coasts by on a French accent and ambiguous verbiage that allows readers to project their own beliefs onto his words. A decade ago, I went through the “cases” of ancient and medieval UFO sightings he had published in Wonders in the Sky (2009), many of which had previously appeared in his classic book Passport to Magonia (1969), and I found a collection of erroneously translated, deceptively edited, and ignorantly misunderstood material that he had long passed off as serious scholarship simply because most ufologists can’t read ancient languages. (For example, Vallée once claimed Charlemagne ordered UFO witnesses put to death; instead, he ordered the “reform” of “weather-magicians.”) Vallée’s more recent support for the ridiculous Trinity hoax—which made it all the way into Congressional legislation on Vallée’s reputation—only confirmed my opinion. 

​Vallée’s biography is fascinating as a portrait of the gradual crackup of twentieth century minds coming unmoored from reality in the face of political, social, and scientific forces they could barely understand, let alone control. His list of friends ran the length and breadth of the dissenters from consensus reality, including everyone from J. Allen Hynek to Anton LaVey. He worked closely with Hal Puthoff, served as the government’s de facto UFO philosopher, claimed to have inspired Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and even filled in for the late Rod Serling in a credulous UFO documentary, UFOs: It Has Begun. And yet, despite his many efforts at “scientific” ufology, from deploying psychics to testing “alien” metals, he never found even a single shred of indisputable proof of aliens. Turning necessity into a virtue, he refused to accept the obvious and instead proclaimed the aliens were immaterial tricksters who purposely left only confusing traces as a cosmic puzzle and joke, thus the proof of their being was in the lack of proof. It was all very French, very stupid, and fooled the gullible.

​Segment 1
We open with some incorrect claims, wrongly stating that Project Blue Book was the first government UFO investigation (that was Project Sign) and that AATIP was a government UFO program (they meant AAWSAP, which was mostly about Skinwalker Ranch). Jacques Vallée contributed to both Blue Book and AAWSAP, and the show begins by lionizing him, wrongly, as one of the first to relate UFOs to ancient sightings. He wasn’t. Desmond ​Leslie did it more than a decade earlier, and pulp magazines had already done it even before Leslie. The idea originates in 1947, with Ole J. Sneide, the very first to make the claim in print. Vallée did not get to that point until 1969, after even Erich von Däniken had come late to the party with Chariots of the Gods.
 
Vallée relates a childhood flying saucer sighting he had in France in the 1950s, and we hear about his early interest in using computers to analyze UFO data. We hear about Vallée’s meeting with J. Allen Hynek in the early 1960s, when Vallée was 24, and their long relationship—though the show suggests they believed UFOs were alien spaceships (which Vallée believed until the late 1960s) and doesn’t mention that in the book they wrote together, Edge of Reality, seen on screen, they more or less convinced each other they are really interdimensional space poltergeists. They get it to it later, but they do not make clear in this segment that Vallée changed his ideas over time. It is sloppy writing and bad use of b-roll. They should have set up the chronology more directly and avoided material from later this early.

​Segment 2
The second segment describes Vallée’s efforts to convince Hynek to investigate UFO landings. The Socorro, New Mexico Lonnie Zamora case is rehearsed, though skeptics generally label the alleged alien encounter a hoax, probably by local college students. Vallée and Hynek considered this case the moment they changed their belief system and began speaking out about space invaders. From this, the two men began recruiting like-minded believing scientists, a group they called the “Invisible College.” The segment ends with the government closing Blue Book and declaring UFOs uninteresting and unlikely to be alien, angering Vallée, who returned to France.

​Segment 3
The third segment discusses Vallée writing Passport to Magonia during a strike in France that gave him research time. It’s very strange to see the show suggesting that his ancient astronaut speculations, by 1969 exceedingly common among authors like Jacques Bergier, Robert Charroux, Eric von Däniken, and many others, is somehow special and unique to Vallée. None of his “conclusions” about myth and folklore being related to UFO experiences was unique to him; he merely dressed up what had been pulp sensationalism in ponderous French philosophizing. After pretending Vallée had primacy, the show remembers von Däniken, acknowledges Chariots came out “within a few months” (though it was the earlier book), and hauls the elderly von Däniken out to acknowledge that he once read one of Vallée’s books, though he seems a little miffed that Vallée is taking credit for the ideas he stole first.

​Segment 4
The fourth segment discusses Vallée’s 1970s-era work on ARPANET, the early internet, before discussing his 1970s-era change in belief from nuts-and-bolts UFOs to his belief in interdimensional space poltergeists. The show acknowledges that Hynek shared this belief and wrote about in The Edge of Reality (1975), but it credits Vallée with developing the concept. He did no. Indeed, sci-fi writer R. Dewitt Miller proposed it in in 1947, almost three decades earlier. The show discusses Steven Spielberg’s interest in Vallée and Hynek and how their ideas were reflected in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. 

​Segment 5
The fifth segment discusses Vallée’s work with billionaire Robert Bigelow to investigate UFOs. Vallée created a database of 260,000 documents about UFOs called Capella for data crunching, but the show weaves 1990s work with Bigelow with paeans to future A.I.-powered research, and what actually is happening with the database is unclear. The show claims Vallée’s database was part of “AATIP” (apparently AAWSAP), but the show does not acknowledge Bigelow’s role in AAWSAP, instead presenting this as the “Pentagon” patronizing Vallée rather than Bigelow doing so under a Congressionally mandated Pentagon contract. Remarkably, neither Vallée nor the show can point to any useful results from a massive database of people’s UFO stories of wildly varying quality.

​Segment 6
As we bring this turkey in for landing, it’s disappointing that the show did not discuss Vallée’s wide and wild social circle of occultists and celebrities, his bizarrely deep influence on the CIA and the Pentagon, his close relationship with Hal Puthoff and Project Stargate, or his role in popularizing cattle mutilation, Trinity, and other dubious ideas. Instead, our superficial look at Vallée’s life ends with his contributions to Avi Loeb’s Galileo Project. It’s a half-assed hagiography that seems to barely understand its own subject.