You know Jacques Vallee.

You may not realize that you know him but, if you’ve seen Close Encounters of the Third Kind, you now Jacques Vallee – Spielberg based the French scientist on him, the one played by François Truffaut. The one who you hear in the background as Richard Dreyfuss is hustled aboard the helicopter – the scientist shouts over the sound of the chopper blades, in French, translated almost real-time by his translator, “We didn’t choose these people! They were invited!”

Jacques Vallee is, at this writing, in his 80s and I haven’t seen any new works by him recently but I really enjoyed his earlier work. He started his professional career as an astronomer at the Paris Observatory. Later he moved to the U.S. and continued to work in Astronomy, where he and a partner developed the first computerized model of Mars. While working as a systems analyst at Northwestern, he worked alongside J. Allen Hynek, who was studying UFOs while chairing the Astronomy Department. Vallee went on to work on AI (in the 1960s!) and, after earning a PhDs in computer science and engineering, he worked in information systems in different organizations, including Stanford. Later he was a consultant at the Institute for Plasma Research, a senior research fellow at the IFTF, and was a principal investigator for computer networking at the National Science Foundation, working on things like ARPNET’s Planning Network, the precursor to instant messaging.

I regurgitate his Wikipedia page here because I want you to appreciate that this guy – unlike some of the authors out there talking about aliens, looking at you Bud Hopkins and Whitley Strieber – is a scientist. His books advocate for the view that the scientific community should be investigating UFO reports from a scientific point of view, as opposed to sweeping them under the rug and accusing those who report them as mistaken, foolish, rubes, or charlatans.

I do believe that there are a number of mistaken, foolish, rubes, and charlatans out there talking about UFOs. For some people, it’s an honest mistake – like when I saw airplanes landing at JFK at night from an apartment at the end of the runway, which made them look like they were descending straight down and growing larger as they approached. For a second, I wondered, “What is that?” and then I realized. Some people make the honest mistake and then refuse to let go of their original thought. Some people are fooled by people who want something for themselves (like that Lazar guy). And some people want to fool people, seeking fame or fortune or power or influence.

Over a number of years, Vallee wrote a series of books discussing his UFO researches. He took a scientific approach to his study, reporting what he had heard without judgement. Throughout the series, his theories about what UFOs are evolved.

In this book, he draws parallels between UFO encounters, religious experiences throughout the ages, and fairy tales. He theorizes that UFOs are not spaceships from outer space, but something much closer to home, perhaps from another dimension, specifically intended to shape our thoughts and beliefs about something.

This is my least favorite of his books – I’ve go the rest of them around her somewhere but, oops, paperbacks, shelved behind my hardcovers and hard to put hands on. At one point this year, I came across them while looking for something else (oh, there you are!) and piled them all on the arm of the couch and the cat knocked them on the floor.

Cats: no respect for books.

Anyway, if you want the OG of alien books, someone who approaches the study from a scientific perspective, not going around using amateur hypnosis on witnesses or scaring them within an inch of their lives with horror stories, this is the guy to read.