Jacques Fabrice Vallée is a respected computer scientist, research academic, folklorist and ufologist. He is recognised for his work with NASA, during which he created the first detailed informational map of Mars, collaborating with the academic astronomer Gérard de Vaucouleurs at The University of Texas. Throughout the late 20th century Vallée held tenure at Northwestern University. At the same time, he continued to pursue non-institutional ufological research with his mentor, J. Allen Hynek, then chair of the University’s astronomy department. Hynek had previously served as head of the U.S. Airforce’s infamous investigation into UFOs, Project Bluebook. Their work together has been fundamental to the development of both UFO research.
In his book, Messengers of Deception, Vallée discusses the appropriation of UFO contactee stories by the media and culture in general, arguing that UFO-related conspiracy theories are typically paranoid, but that there also exist, nonetheless, instances in which various entities have conspired to direct public impressions of the UFO phenomenon to their own advantage, whether corporate, military or personal. In general, Vallée cautions against conflating these distorted representations of a real and currently unexplained phenomenon with stories about some grand conspiracy.
*
"Furthermore, the "Esoteric Intervention" hypothesis [the suggestion that a human-led magical body steers the UFO phenomenon] is a conspiracy theory, and suffers from all the weaknesses of such theories. It is only superficially attractive. Historical conspiracies do exist (generally in a multitude of forms rather than in a single one at a given time), but they either fail quickly or reach their objective and therefore change in both style and purpose. When de Gaulle came back to power in France in 1958, there were a dozen different conspiracies fighting among themselves for control of the government, but they were evolving very rapidly from one day to the next until the historic climax. Most UFO contactees propose a conspiratorial theory to explain their own views. According to George Hunt Williamson and John McCoy, for instance, all the evil in the world is due to the International Bankers, a well-known belief of the extreme right: "The force behind the 'International Bankers' who constitute the 'Hidden Empire' stems from Communist Russia." Other groups will blame world problems on the CIA, the Jews, the Mafia, the KGB. Such paranoia is often nourished by a few elements of reality. The scope and character of the cattle mutilations do indicate that some sort of secret organization is responsible. There is no question that the public mind is linking the activity of this organization with that of the UFOs. Its effects are physical enough. Similarly, most of those who have studied the UMMO affair have concluded that it was the work of a secret group on Earth. Although the hypothesis, as presented above, has serious shortcomings, there is an interesting variant which deserves further exploration. Some influential group could well be using various cults as a front for its own purposes, as Major Murphy suggested to me. Some occult specialists go beyond this view, and suggest that the UFO phenomenon could even be the device that such a group is using to make its existence felt, to project an image of the future destiny of Man that transcends war, poverty, disease, and national government. Several human groups could be manipulating the public's interest in UFOs to further their own political goals. They could try to achieve this by deliberate use of confusion techniques, by planting fake UFO evidence, by amplifying contactee mythology, and by systematically discouraging scientific inquiry into the nature ofUFOs. The obsession with secrecy which is the trademark of our military institutions would greatly facilitate the task of any private group that is trying to confuse the public, because any effort by independent analysts to sort out the meaningful facts from the hoaxes and trivia would be entangled in layer after layer of classified material. The only way to fight the confusion that surrounds the UFO problem is to realize that much of this confusion is deliberate, and to make renewed individual efforts to document the phenomenon in the field and outside the framework of any UFO group. At the same time, a systematic attempt should be made to expose the contradictions of the contactee claims and to educate the public about them. Arthur Koestler has remarked, in a letter to me, that contactee stories left him with the same feeling as listening to a bad dirty joke. It is an apt remark. Many contactees are sincere, but they are trapped by their own narrow belief in distorted interpretations of a much larger reality. Is there a group which understands and practices deception, and which is trying to mould our collective future? I have tried to show that several historical precedents exist for such an hypothesis, and that the data do not exclude this interpretation. I hope that my remarks can serve as a warning to any future research effort. Sources of information should be severely scrutinized, not only for human error, instrumental inaccuracy, and observational bias, but also for deliberate deception. The standards of evidence acceptable in the scientific laboratory are not sufficient to deal with UFO data. They must be upgraded before any research can proceed, and the public should not accept as valid the results published by any "scientific committee" that has not faced this fact. [...] I still feel that the UFO phenomenon represents a manifestation of a reality that transcends our current understanding of physics. It is not the phenomenon itself, but the belief it has created, which is manipulated by human groups with their own objectives." – Jacques Vallée, Messengers of Deception (2008)
*
*
THE LOOM OF ATHENA 