On the Record – 1990

MYSTERY WIRE – In 1990 George Knapp interviewed Jacques Vallée during the television show called “On the Record” which aired on KLAS-TV in Las Vegas, NV.

Below is a transcript of the above interview between George Knapp and Jacques Vallée.

George Knapp
Welcome back to On the Record, Dr. Jacques Vallée is an astrophysicist who provided the inspiration for the character of the French scientist in the film, Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Vallée believes that UFOs are real that they leave behind physical evidence, but that they don’t necessarily come from outer space.

Jacques Vallée
I’m talking about when I listened to the witnesses, and I tried to listen very carefully to what people tell me, they are describing phenomena that an objects that appear very often out of nowhere, disappear on the spot, objects that are changing shapes, objects that merge together, if the technology or the phenomenon can do that, what that tells me is that it is manipulating time and space dimensions in ways that are beyond our science. And if they can do that they can be from anywhere, anytime. They don’t have to be from a particular planet in outer space.

George Knapp
You’ve also done some exciting research on physical manifestations, other physical manifestations associated with UFOs, describe that.

Jacques Vallée
Well, what we know, I think the way we get into trouble, as scientists talking about UFOs, is that we mix up three different levels. There is a physical level, there is a physiological level, which is what happens to people like you and me when you get close to one of those things in a close encounter situation. And then there is a belief level, the mythological or sociological level, if you will. On the physical level, what we know today is that UFOs are a lot of energy in a small space. I’ve just published a book called Confrontations in which I’ve gone through the basic observations of the light and the energy from UFOs. What we know is that these objects present probably the energy of a small nuclear plant in a small volume. And it’s manifested in light, in microwaves, and in pulsed microwaves. Now, we don’t know a lot about what pulse microwaves do to the human brain. So I spent a lot of time looking at the medical effects. For example, in 1988, I spent two weeks in Brazil, in the interior of Brazil, from Fortaleza, to the Amazon, talking to people who had seen the beams, had been injured by beams from UFOs. And there is no question that there is a lot of concentrated energy, in a form that we don’t understand.

George Knapp
Injured how? Burned?

Jacques Vallée
Not really burned, the there’s impact on the on the skin, they do this describe a hot sensation, but the beam would also pin them down and push them. And we don’t know how to make a beam that does that.

George Knapp
How many people did you talk to?

Jacques Vallée
50 people in from in the in those villages in those different isolated villages, and they describe the lights, the frequency of the light, they describe the flickering, they describe the objects, which in many cases were very, very close to them.

George Knapp
What do you make of the whole abduction hypothesis?

Jacques Vallée
There we’re going to the second level, which is a physiological and psychological level. First there is no question in my mind that something has happened to those people. In other words, those are real occurrences. Those are not imaginary or purely psychological. I said before, we don’t know too much about what happens to the human brain when you’re in situation where a pulse microwaves are in your environment. It’s possible that people who get close to a real UFO go into an altered state in which their perceptions can be manipulated. And what is critical there is to be able to retrieve the memory from those witnesses. And that memory very often is erased or is not available to them or maybe replaced by hallucinatory or delusionary material. So my problem with the whole abduction, and I’m trying to choose my words carefully here. My problem with the whole way abductions are studied is that the hypnosis, very often hypnosis is used by people who are not trained to do that. And I would caution you know, anyone in your audience who has had an abduction experience, only to seek counsel from people who are trained as clinical hypnotist or as MDs in the use of hypnosis.

George Knapp
But hypnosis by itself is a useful tool?

Jacques Vallée
Yes, but it’s not necessarily going to give you the truth. And I think you have to look at the standards for the miscibility of hypnosis in court, for example, to find what the pitfalls are, because it’s very easy to influence people with your own belief. The person under hypnosis will easily pick up what your own beliefs are and what you expect them to say. And they will lead you consciously or unconsciously, they lead the witness to say certain things and I have a lot of trouble with it. I think it is unethical, and I think it’s not going to get us to the truth.

George Knapp
You said it is a real, something really is going on. But is it what they’re describing, abducted by strange beings? That kind of thing. Or is it all psychological?

Jacques Vallée
I don’t think it’s all psychological. The beings have been described also by people who are not abducted in quotes by people who were at some distance. I just spent a week in the Soviet Union talking to research groups there, especially about the Voronezh case, in which dozens of witnesses, not just kids, but also adults, have seen different kinds of different kinds of beings. But there is a problem with the way those beings are described in this country. Over the last two or three years, we’ve been bombarded by a lot of marketing, very, very good marketing, to promote certain books and certain movies that introduced the idea that the beings were always four feet tall, were always bald and had big eyes. Well, that’s one kind that has been described. But it’s not the only kind. And many other kinds of … and it’s interesting to speculate as to why, you know, the American public has been being bombarded by that particular picture of an alien.

George Knapp
Well, why is it?

Jacques Vallée
Well, maybe someone is, you know, there are lots of games being played behind the phenomenon itself. In other words, there is a real phenomenon. But there may be, and here we’re talking about the third level, the sociological level. If you could make people expect aliens, you could manipulate public opinion.

George Knapp
We’ll come back to that in just a moment. You are something of an anomaly. I mean, a real scientist who’s studying….

Jacques Vallée
There are a few of us, there are a few of us, most of them stay underground because they don’t want to put their jobs in jeopardy.

George Knapp
Would your job be in jeopardy in some sense, or your reputation, or scientists if they wanted to get into this field?

Jacques Vallée
The people, oddly enough, the people I work with, are encouraging my work. And, in many cases, have sightings of their own or experiences of their own that they have not volunteered.

George Knapp
This is something though that is worthy of study by real scientists. I wonder if the day will come when more people will get into it?

Jacques Vallée
I think it should be studied by scientists. I think it should be. It’s a very interesting time to do this kind of research, especially because we we now see that there are many different hypotheses about it. It’s not just that either it doesn’t exist, or it has to be extraterrestrial. There are many other hypotheses. And to me, the UFO phenomenon is I don’t have a solution. But to me it’s an opportunity to do some good science and perhaps to test some of our theories about physics. Now theories for example, today in physics about the possibility of other dimensions beyond time and space. There is a theory called the string theory that speculates about 10 dimensions and not just three dimensions of space and one dimension of time.

George Knapp
Does the government really care what UFO researchers do? Has the government lied about UFO some thoughts on that when we return.