FigureJacques Vallée (b. 1939)
aka Jacques Vallée · Jacques Vallee · Vallée · Vallee
French-American computer scientist and astrophysicist; principal investigator on the ARPANET-era Network Information Center; PhD astrophysics, Northwestern (under Hynek); author of *Passport to Magonia* (1969), the book that reframed the UFO phenomenon as folkloric rather than extraterrestrial.
What's documented
Born Pontoise, France, 1939. MSc astrophysics, Lille; PhD computer science, Northwestern (1967), where Hynek was on his committee. Vallée was a principal investigator on the ARPANET Network Information Center under Doug Engelbart at SRI through the 1970s — he is one of a small group whose names appear in both the early-internet and the early-ufology professional records. Anatomy of a Phenomenon (1965), Passport to Magonia (1969), and Messengers of Deception (1979) reframed the phenomenon as continuous with fairy-faith folklore and as a control-system on human belief. He was the model for the French scientist Lacombe in Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977). Vallée’s Forbidden Science journals (five volumes, 1957–present) are the most detailed contemporaneous diary of a serious researcher’s internal life inside the field.