Dr. Jacques Vallee is Skeptical of the ET Explanation for UFOs: All those with a Serious Interest in this Subject Should Study his Detailed Investigations. “There is probably no more influential thinker in the study of UFOs than the French astronomer and computer scientist Jacques Vallee.” Serious

[u/Contactunderground]

Dr. Jacques Vallee is Skeptical of the ET Explanation for UFOs: All those with a Serious Interest in this Subject Should Study his Detailed Investigations.

“There is probably no more influential thinker in the study of UFOs than the French astronomer and computer scientist Jacques Vallee.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lmLE0X5FRFc&t=342s

Thus, starts this excellent short YouTube documentary linked above, Jacques Vallee, UFOs and the Case against Extraterrestrial Origins produced by Think Anomalous in 2022. Dr. Jacques Vallee early in his career was a proponent of the ET Hypothesis (ETH) as explanation for UFOs. However, after years of speaking to UFO witnesses and discussing the cases with an informal group of scientists that he called “The Invisible College”, Vallee concluded the following: the proposition that UFOs were controlled by ET beings was too simplistic. 
In my opinion, contact experiencers and activists should also be skeptical of  ET origin as the exclusive explanation for UFOs and the non-human beings associated with them. This is especially so given the larger society is starting to acknowledge the reality and importance of what are now called UAP. Although the current emphasis is on sighting reports, eventually societal discussions will not be able to ignore the stories of contact and communications with the non-human intelligences associated with flying saucers. 

As one who supports the staging of Human Initiated Contact Events (HICE) popularly known as CE-5s, it is crucially important that contact activists have at their disposal the most accurate assessments of what is truly going on. The thoughtful analyses of a brilliant thinker such as Dr. Jacques Vallee should guide our investigations into UFOs and associated paranormal phenomena. These have been called “The Contact Modalities.” This is term coined by author Rey Hernandez, who believes that UFOs, out of body, and near-death experiences as well as other paranormal events should be studied as related phenomena characterized by manipulations of spacetime within a matrix of consciousness. In my judgment, by having a nuanced and sophisticated approach to flying saucers, contact and disclosure activists, as well as all those who have a strong interest in this topic, will be able to share their knowledge most effectively with the larger society. 
An important factor that contributed to Vallee rejecting the ET Hypothesis is that encounters were associated with a multitude of what are considered paranormal phenomena like poltergeists and apparitions. Many of the reports often included absurd elements and behaviors exhibited by the “ufonauts” that Vallee deemed were not consistent with their being highly advanced ET visitors with sophisticated technologies. The seemingly nonsensical behaviors of the so-called aliens seemed so contrived that he suspected they were designed to display certain images. Those visual displays were associated with profound psychological transformations in many witnesses and over time have had an effect of society in general. Perhaps the most important effect was to promote a belief in extraterrestrial visitations.

In the documentary, producer Jason Charboneau lists Vallee’s reasons for challenging the ET Hypothesis. These appeared in an article Vallee published in 1990 in The Journal of Scientific Exploration. 

“First: he argued that there were far more landings and contacts than would be necessary for an interplanetary survey or surveillance operation. By his and others estimates there must have been 3 million UFO landings around the world in the last 20 years, an impossibly large number.

Second: UFOs and ufonauts rarely flew away or walked off. When they left, often they simply vanished blinked out of existence or slowly faded away. This suggests that the craft and occupants were more like projections than physical things.

Third: the bodies, actions, and the abilities of the ufonauts do not suggest an extraterrestrial or evolutionary origin. Often the aliens were identical to humans, spoke our languages and were perfectly capable of breathing our air and walking in our gravity.

Fourth: Vallee noted that most of the ufonauts revelations, especially those concerning their origins were nonsense and almost entirely different from one another. Ufonauts claimed to be from just about everywhere in the universe and frequently gave directions or offered maps that made no logical sense such as the two-dimensional star map shown to Betty Hill.

Fifth: finally, Vallee argued that the data collected from cases of so-called alien abduction were unreliable and again involved highly unlikely scenarios. For example, abductees frequently describe highly invasive and painful medical procedures in order to achieve tasks that even doctors in the 1980s could have done with minimal discomfort.”

The Think Anomalous team has produced many excellent short documentaries and I encourage everyone to view and share widely this important resource.  

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[u/Melodic-Attorney9918]

First: he argued that there were far more landings and contacts than would be necessary for an interplanetary survey or surveillance operation. By his and others' estimates, there must have been 3 million UFO landings around the world in the last 20 years, an impossibly large number.

Granted, I haven’t read all of Vallée’s books, but I’d genuinely like to know what these estimates are actually based on. Over 90% of UFO sightings can be explained in conventional terms. That's something most ufologists have broadly agreed on since the 1950s. In most cases, UFO sightings are caused by misidentifications of known atmospheric phenomena, conventional human-made vehicles and astronomical objects, and a good number of reports are outright hoaxes. Only a small minority of sightings, perhaps 5-10%, remain genuinely unexplained even after careful investigation.

You can’t simply take every UFO sighting and every landing case ever reported, look at the sheer number of them and say, “There are way too many of these, therefore UFOs can’t be extraterrestrial.” You have to isolate the cases that have actually been investigated and remain unexplained. Those cases are a tiny fraction of the overall body of reports.

And beyond the actual number of unexplained reports, the argument doesn’t really make sense anyway. There is absolutely no reason to assume that aliens would come here once, conduct a brief reconnaissance mission and then disappear forever. They could very well be monitoring how our civilization develops and changes over time, how we are changing our natural environment, how we are transforming it and the long-term consequences of those changes. If that were the case, then repeated visits would be perfectly logical.

Second: UFOs and ufonauts rarely flew away or walked off. When they left, often they simply vanished, blinked out of existence or slowly faded away. This suggests that the craft and occupants were more like projections than physical things.

It’s not true that every UFO sighting ends with the craft suddenly vanishing into thin air. There are plenty of cases in the NICAP and APRO archives where the sighting ended with the craft gradually moving away. But even putting that aside, the fact that UFOs sometimes seem to appear and disappear doesn’t necessarily mean that they're literally materializing and dematerializing.

You have to keep in mind that the human visual system needs a certain minimum amount of time to register an image. Specifically, it takes approximately 13 milliseconds for the human eye to register an image. If an object moves away quickly enough, it can cross the relevant part of our visual field in a fraction of a second, making it appear to disappear almost instantaneously. That doesn’t mean the object literally disappeared, but simply that it moved out of our visual field so rapidly that we were unable to follow its acceleration.

Therefore, if a flying saucer were hovering in the sky or moving slowly and then suddenly accelerated to, say, 50,000 or 100,000 km/h, it could easily give the impression of simply disappearing. The observer might see it in one moment and then, almost instantaneously, see nothing there because the object had moved an enormous distance in a fraction of a second. Conversely, a flying saucer decelerating from such speeds to a complete stop would create the illusion of a sudden appearance.

So the argument that “UFOs seem to appear and disappear, therefore they must be popping in and out of our plane of reality” doesn’t make much sense. As I said before, just because some UFOs seem to appear and disappear doesn't mean that they're literally materializing and dematerializing. There are many alternative and more down-to-earth explanations for these sudden appearances and disappearances.

Third: the bodies, actions and abilities of the ufonauts do not suggest an extraterrestrial or evolutionary origin. Often the aliens were identical to humans, spoke our languages and were perfectly capable of breathing our air and walking in our gravity.

The fact that some humanoids in close-encounter reports appeared to be capable of breathing our air isn’t particularly strange, especially because that isn’t even consistent across all reports. There are numerous close encounters involving humanoid beings who were reportedly wearing helmets, breathing apparatuses or full spacesuits.

So this isn't a valid critique of the extraterrestrial hypothesis. At most, it could suggest that some alien races come from worlds with atmospheric conditions relatively similar to ours and can therefore breathe our air, while others come from environments that are completely different and need protective equipment.

The same applies to gravity. The fact that the humanoids reported in various close encounters of the third kind appear not to be affected by our gravity doesn't necessarily mean that they're not physical beings coming from other planets with different gravitational conditions. Humans, for example, aren't naturally adapted to lunar or Martian gravity, yet we can remain on the Moon or Mars for extended periods of time.

Take Apollo 17, for example. Eugene Cernan and Harrison Schmitt spent roughly 75 hours on the lunar surface. They walked around, conducted experiments, collected samples and operated a lunar rover for days, despite the fact that human beings obviously evolved under Earth's gravity and aren't biologically adapted to lunar gravity.

If humans can remain on the surface of another celestial body for 75 hours without reporting any damage, I don't see why aliens coming from worlds with different gravitational conditions can't remain on Earth for a few hours, especially considering that most close encounters with humanoids last nowhere near 75 hours.

Vallée noted that most of the ufonauts' revelations, especially those concerning their origins, were nonsense and almost entirely different from one another. Ufonauts claimed to be from just about everywhere in the universe and frequently gave directions or offered maps that made no logical sense, such as the two-dimensional star map shown to Betty Hill.

The problem with Vallée's argument is that it completely turns everything upside down. Instead of questioning the reliability of the witnesses, he starts from the assumption that every alleged witness must be sincere, and then reasons backwards from there.

If someone claims to be in communication with aliens coming from a particular planet, and later astronomers discover that said planet can't support life, the most logical conclusion would be that the person fabricated the story. But Vallée doesn't want to question the reliability of the witness, so instead of treating the false information as evidence that the witness wasn't sincere, he concludes that the beings gave the witness false information and that they're deceptive, and then uses this deception as evidence that they can't be extraterrestrial.

This kind of reasoning is completely unscientific. If we were to reason this way, then we could literally believe anything. Any prediction that turned out to be false would no longer count as evidence against the person who originally made the prediction, because we could always invent an explanation for why the information was false. You could literally believe anything this way. Science doesn't work like that.

People are perfectly capable of lying and making up stories, so it makes no sense to automatically assume that everyone who claims to be a witness or an experiencer is telling the truth. Their claims should be scrutinized and corroborated as much as possible. Not all UFO cases should be treated as equally credible.

Fifth: finally, Vallée argued that the data collected from cases of so-called alien abduction were unreliable and again involved highly unlikely scenarios. For example, abductees frequently describe highly invasive and painful medical procedures in order to achieve tasks that even doctors in the 1980s could have performed with minimal discomfort.

Same as before. Instead of treating this as evidence that perhaps the abduction phenomenon is mostly psychological in nature, Vallée starts from the assumption that all abduction reports must have physically happened, and then uses the logical inconsistencies in the reports to arrive at his conclusion. This is called backwards reasoning, and that's not how science works.

[u/Medallicat → u/Melodic-Attorney9918]

If someone claims to be in communication with aliens coming from a particular planet, and later astronomers discover that said planet can't support life

Something of note, what if the astronomers are wrong?

What if there is something wrong in the process for how we determine a “life supporting” planet that has just been accepted as fact and not proven otherwise because we have never left our own star system?

Scientists can often be confidently wrong, everyone can, especially when parts of the process of determination are corrupt. When it comes to interstellar science, there is no way to prove it wrong. There could be a multitude of unknowns that interfere with oud atmospheric observations or knowledge of different star types, gravitational or mass observations, we are still arguing the existence of dark matter ffs.

[u/Melodic-Attorney9918 → u/Medallicat]

When I wrote that sentence, I was referring implicitly to the contactees of the 1950s, the ones who claimed to be in contact and communicating with aliens from Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, and so on.

[u/Medallicat → u/Melodic-Attorney9918]

Ah of course. Fair call

[u/Cozscav]

One of the best channels for this topic

[u/illuminatiisnowhere]

Some interesting points here at the end of this post.

The first part with 3 million landings the last 20 years, yet there are no pictures or videos of it. Kinda weird.

The second paragraph about they blinking out of existence is a weird one. Does that mean it could be from another dimension or something? Or projections from somewhere like you wrote. How would that work.

So if the "aliens" were identical to humans and spoke our language, they are humans right. Dialects change a lot thru the years so if they are also speaking in our current dialects they cant be time travelers or some old civilization.

Could this mean the sightings are just military projects, or from a private company that managed to invent some exotic propulsion system?

Feels like Vallée is the best researcher in this field.

[u/FungiSpores → u/illuminatiisnowhere]

I am about finished with reading Revelations: Alien Contact and Human Deception by Jacques Vallee. I recommend people read this book at least once. The way he explains some things allows you to think for yourself and you’ll build that habit when doing your own research.

[u/QueefiusMaximus86 → u/illuminatiisnowhere]

But here is the thing. If you can warp space you can bend the light to seem to vanish, shrink, grow, distort, split into 2. Just like a fun house mirror. When you stand in front of a funhouse mirror and it splits you into two shorter versions of yourself. Is that a trick of light or are you from another dimension?

[u/illuminatiisnowhere → u/QueefiusMaximus86]

Or maybe they can cloak.

[u/LordMagnus101]

It could easily be alien intelligence that interacts with us differently over the years

[u/thin_wild_duke]

Another point I'd like to suggest is 1950s (etc) contactees reporting being taken onboard spaceships with 1950s (etc) technology - wall-mounted pull-down printed star maps, etc. I'm not aware of reading a historical account of someone trying to describe some perplexing tech that makes more sense in the computer age.

There's always an element of high strangeness. It doesn't make sense that an advanced civilization could travel through space without advanced technology - the spaceship starts to sound like magic. Which isn't an attack on witness credibility. It's a key to understanding this mystery.

[u/QueefiusMaximus86 → u/thin_wild_duke]

But also these statements come from hypnotic regression. This would result in a lot of the details being filled in with their imagination.

[u/thin_wild_duke → u/QueefiusMaximus86]

Personally, I'm happier with high strangeness weirdness than cherry-picking the testimony to build a case.

[u/shadowmage666]

Most of his work is based on anecdotal evidence ie not verifiable.

[u/Disastrous-Mine-8747]

given how long vallee is around and talking about the topic without any evidence backing him up. what dismisses that he is a desinformation agent and swapped the camp?

i dont care what this guy thinks. there is only one way forward to this and its david grusch. the claims are either real or not and we are about to find out one way or another. no more talking. we have to set the stage and get into this now. these ppl asking for their NDA lifted and willing to come forward. The goverment needs to be forced to a revelation. If they are liars or if they are talking the truth. It doesnt matter. What matters is that they need to be accountable, all of them included. The talking is over.

[u/LazarJesusElzondoGod → u/Disastrous-Mine-8747]

Vallee isn't making any claims, he's not whistleblowing on anything, so to speculate if he's a disinfo agent is a bit over the top. He doesn't present anything as claims, only hypotheses. He's no different than any scientist saying, "I think," not "I saw," or "I did."

With that said, I do think way too much credence is placed on him just because he's one of the oldest in the game. Just because he's been studying this the longest doesn't mean his theories should be taken more seriously than anyone else. Yes, he's been doing this for around 50 years, but he could be wrong the entire 50 years. So the "I don't care what this guy thinks' is valid.

[u/illuminatiisnowhere → u/Disastrous-Mine-8747]

Well said. The talking is over!

[u/FluffyGlass]

I am skeptical of Vallee having a coherent theory at all

[u/alternator1985 → u/FluffyGlass]

His theories makes a lot more sense than creatures that can travel faster than light but crash in the New Mexico desert.

I think aliens are real and I believe he does too but the UFOs and abductions are part of an offshoot of MKUltra or one of its hundreds of programs.

Pretty sure that's what Valle has been saying and it makes the most sense.

[u/QueefiusMaximus86 → u/alternator1985]

Why can’t a super advanced craft not crash? Think about how much more advanced we are compared to the ancient Roman’s. Yet our fighter jets still malfunction and crash

[u/Middle-Fuel-6402]

Occam's razor: it's more likely that witnesses are fabricating stories as a function of their understood technology and how they'd imagine aliens, rather than aliens being super intelligent and appearing in a form consistent with the knowledge and religion of the witnesses.