Scroll down to read the transcript of George Knapp’s interview with Jacques Vallée.
MYSTERY WIRE — The atomic age officially began in August 1945 when the world’s first atomic bomb was detonated in New Mexico at a place called Trinity. But something else happened near that site just a few weeks later.
“Now remember, this was 1945, August 1945. Two years before Roswell,” Dr. Jacques Vallée said in a new interview with Mystery Wire. “There was no concept of flying saucers, Kenneth Arnold would come up with that term in July. August ’47 is when all that thing about flying saucers came up. So there was no concept of something like that. And also, the object wasn’t a saucer, the object was shaped like an egg, like an avocado.”
A local rancher and his children said the odd-shaped craft of unknown origin crashed into the desert. The ranchers who lived near the bomb site saw and felt the blast. One of the rancher’s family members was blinded in one eye by the light from the blast.
Vallée, who is an astrophysicist and the world’s foremost authority on UFO mysteries was the model for the French scientist in the Spielberg film “Close Encounters of the Third Kind.”
“Vallée has co-written a new book, Trinity: The Best-Kept Secret, with Paola Harris. The book is based, in part, on the testimony of multiple eyewitnesses who saw the object after it collided with a communications tower, gouged a trench in the desert floor, then came to rest on a ranch property outside of San Antonio New Mexico, not far from the site of the Trinity blast. The eff-shaped object was mostly intact, Vallée says, with the exception of a hole in its side.
The rancher’s two young children said they saw three occupants inside, “They were short. They were about the same size as the kids, about four feet tall. They were humanoid,” Vallée said. “They were breathing the air. They didn’t have a helmet or a mask or anything else. They had sharp eyes. They had almost no mouth and very little nose. And they were wearing coveralls that look gray. And they stayed inside the object so the kids saw them through that opening.”
The size and weight of the craft were estimated by Vallée by finding out what type of truck and trailer were used to haul the craft away from the crash site. “My estimation is between four and a half tons and five tons,” Vallée said. “The kids tried to move it when it was on the truck ready to go. It was on the side because if it had been upright, it wouldn’t have gone under the overpass on the highway.
Vallée says it took days until authorities arrived and by then, the three crewmen were gone, but metal samples were collected and are now undergoing analysis in a lab.
Jacques Vallée and AAWSAP
Vallee also made his first public comments about the AAWSAP program, the Advanced Aerospace Weapon Systems Application Program, a secret investigation into UFOs and related phenomena overseen by the DIA and carried out by BAASS, a private contractor owned by Las Vegas businessman Robert Bigelow. (Details about AAWSAP were made public last week with the release of a new book Skinwalkers at the Pentagon.
Vallée said his role was creating the digital infrastructure for what might be considered the world’s largest database of UFO incidents and anomalous events. Vallee says it is so large that it more akin to a data warehouse than a data base.
“That was the main product of the project,” Vallée said. “They make that clear in the book, there were a number of people working on it, all I can do is confirm what their book says. I mean, it’s accurate. I’m surprised at how accurate it is. Because you know, that database exists. And it’s not really a database, it’s a data warehouse with a number of parallel stovepipes because you can describe when a pilot has seen the same way as a kid or a trucker or radar. So you have to have a structure that cuts across and preserves the unique stovepipe parameters of an aircraft, you know, another type of site. So that’s what we built, I designed it. The credit should go to Lieutenant Colonel Kurth, who led the team that took it over from me, I transferred it to them after the design was done. What was done was only 1/3 of the work. The plan was then to build another layer of authentication of the entire data warehouse, which were about 200,000 cases. But you know, 200,000 records you can put in your cell phone today. So, it’s not a big database. What’s big is that every record was very long and complex, okay. And that took time to dig up, validate, and translate from other languages. We had translators, interpreters and so on on the staff, and they were trained on what to look for, what to recognize. And then so it is pretty big at the end of the day, and then there was a third layer that I designed and never implemented of AI on top of it. You need to use artificial intelligence, that’s the proper use of AI to make sense of all the data.”
George Knapp
Jacques Vallée, it’s great to see you and great to be able to talk to you as always. I want to start with the broader discussion about UFO crashes. As noted in the book, Trinity: The Best-Kept Secret, you get asked as I do a lot about UFO crashes, how is it possible they crash? They fly all the way here from Zeta Reticuli, and then they get here and they crashed? I don’t buy it. That’s what people tell me. How do you answer people when they ask that question?
Jacques Vallée
It’s a fair question. And, you know, I must eat Humble Pie here. Because for a long time, people have been asking me to talk about crashes. And I haven’t talked about it very much. And I remember the days with Dr. Hynek, where we were talking about Roswell and all the other cases and people were sending us data, you know about things that I had picked up. But we never had something, you know, that we could take to the lab, and test until really this this case. Even at Roswell, you know, as fascinating as Roswell is, of course I believe in the witnesses, but the witnesses got to the site a couple of days later, okay. There, there wasn’t anyone there who actually saw the thing crash on that particular property. They had to search for it, if you remember, and there was this big storm and they had trouble finding the location. In fact, still now there are people arguing that they are two different locations, and so on. In this case, this is a turning point, because the case happened on the property where the witnesses were. They were there every day, there were two young children. The oldest one was nine, but they were there every day checking the cattle for their family. This was at the end of World War Two, and all the adults were fighting. You know, all the able bodied men and women were deployed from Japan to Germany. And so the children were given the job of taking care of their cattle. And on that particular day, they were looking for a cow that they knew was going to have a calf, and their father wanted to make sure that the calf was okay, that the mother was okay, and they could mark the cows with their brand and everything else. So they were there and they were there with very good binoculars on their horse. And an object came up. It came in from the east, from the southeast. And it hit a communication tower, which was controlling communication on the north end of White Sands. Those were the late days of World War Two, the atom bomb had been exploded there. About over three weeks before. They had seen the explosion. They were within the perimeter, the enlarged perimeter of White Sands. So they were well used to the military operations in the area. That communication tower was both for civilian and military airplanes, guiding them around the mountain. After it crashed into the tower, the object got to the ground. It didn’t exactly crash it. It kept its integrity. It didn’t blow up into pieces the way an airplane would have. It was apparently very strong. The tower was bent but the object kept going. It came to the ground, and it plowed an avenue all the way down the hill. They made a turn apparently under power and stopped against a bump in the terrain. The kids saw that. Now remember, this was 1945, August 1945. Two years before Roswell. There was no concept of flying saucers, you know, Kenneth Arnold, would come up with that term in July. August 1947 is when all that thing about flying saucers came up. So there was no concept of something like that. And also, the object wasn’t a saucer, the object was shaped like an egg, like an avocado. They, of course, spoke Spanish. And the term they used was an avocado about the size of two trucks. So this was, it’s hard to say that it didn’t happen. I mean, obviously it did happen. I mean, that tower was bent. The traces on the ground, the kids knew that the first thing to do in a case like this, again, was the end of the war, was to help the pilots of whatever that thing was. So they rushed down, the vegetation is on fire, the brush is on fire, the object is not on fire contrary to what some books have said. But we have all the details, because with Paola Harris was the first to know about the case, she interviewed both of the witnesses with who by then were in their 70s. And I’ve had a chance with her over the last four years to re-interview Mr. Padilla, Jose Padilla, who is still very much alive, has an extremely good memory, which I envy, I don’t have a good memory. And we reconstructed everything. And we found a third witness, and a fourth witness. There was a bomber that was coming in for landing at Alamogordo. Alamogordo is the airbase inside White Sands, which is an enormous area, as you know. And he was told by the control tower to take a look at the communication tower because they had lost communication with the north end of the range. So he circles a tower. He says the tower has been hit by something. So it confirms what the witnesses are telling us. And then he sees the fire and the smoke. So he circles the object. He describes that there is an object there, and two little Indians. Well, they are not Indians, you know, but they were their horses, so we have a check from everything. And the two kids look at the object, they are shocked to see there is an opening. Apparently there is one panel that has been ejected with the thing hit the tower. Through that opening, they see three beings, three creatures inside. And I’ve had a chance to go through the transcripts that Paola recorded. Sometimes they talk about little men. Sometimes they talk about creatures. So I asked Jose how come you can’t tell me if they were creatures or men? Well, they were short. They were about the same size as the kids about four feet tall. They were humanoid. They were breathing the air. They didn’t have a helmet or a mask or anything else. They had sharp eyes. They had almost no mouth and very little nose. And they were wearing coveralls that look gray. And they stayed inside the object so the kids saw them through that opening sort of being apparently very agitated, very worried about, but they they were not apparently not hurt. So they watched this for a while and then they say they have to report it to somebody. The older kid, Jose, wants to go inside and help. The younger kid Raimi doesn’t want anything to do with it. He’s very scared, he’s crying, he’s terrified. They decide the important thing is to report it, which is true. They get on their horses, they go home, they report it to their father. The father calls the state police and the State Police is going to come there, you know 48 hours later with the Father and with the kids. So that’s essentially the stage. Paola was the first to know about the case and to interview both of the witnesses, and to gather the information, and then she brought me in to look at the technical aspects of it. And we’ve been working on it for four years, I’ve gone there five times.
George Knapp
How is it that you and she hooked up? I know that in UFO literature, there are brief references to the case. But it’s such that nobody really dug into it to any degree until she did. How did the two of you get together? And how that collaboration worked out?
Jacques Vallée
About a year before I had started to look at other cases in New Mexico where there was an opportunity to recover some hardware, or at least some samples. As you know, there are half a dozen crash sites in New Mexico. For colleagues of mine, and the scientist at Stanford, we had access to a site that had been kept very quiet, very secret. And we were going there with metal detectors and shovels to dig up something. And in fact, we found a number of things that we were bringing back to the lab to test. I had a friend who was very interested in this who lived in New Mexico, and who told me there is another case that you should look at. And he invited me to look into this case in San Antonio, New Mexico, I didn’t know much about the case. He didn’t tell me much. He told me that was a case that was linked to the end of World War Two, and to the atom bomb. And he took me to the Owl Cafe, which is now a very notorious place. San Antonio, New Mexico, not San Antonio, Texas. And I had a good time there, you know, absorbing the atmosphere. Of course, that was a place where the scientists from Project Manhattan came to have dinner. And so that little place in the middle of nowhere was serving hamburgers, and selling produce and so on to the scientists when they were in the middle of the preparation for the bomb. Nobody knew, of course, who they were, but they were, you know, Enrico Fermi, Oppenheimer, Nobel prizes, people from all over the place from all over Europe and America, working on finishing and testing the bomb. So that was a very impressive and humbling experience. I became aware that Paola had already researched the case. And I had put some of her interviews on one writer. So that’s when I decided to call her. And then we got together. The idea was that I had access to analysis, I had access to scientists who could help me look at any data we could get. So that would, you know, augment the research she had done interviewing the witnesses at the site. So she introduced me to Mr. Padilla, and the superior took us to the site several times and explained the situation.
George Knapp
You know there are a lot of alleged crash sites, you mentioned there are six in New Mexico, there are others all over the world. And the stories, the reports dug up by different investigators have varying degrees of credibility. Is that part of why you sort of stayed away from the subject, at least in public? Because, for example, Roswell, the granddaddy of them all. For me, even though as much time as I spend on this, it becomes sort of muddled with all the disinformation from government people and then bad information from UFO folks. It’s a slog to get through this stuff.
Jacques Vallée
Yes. Well, my reference for Roswell was always Stanton Friedman’s books, because Stanton was an atomic physicist. And he was very good at tracking down stories into the archives, the official archives. But you’re right, I mean, it’s still, when you talk to scientists about that, they say, fascinating story, I’m ready to believe you, you know, I know your reputation, you’re not crazy, but you haven’t given me anything I can take back to the lab and test, okay. This case helps the credibility of Roswell, because we found details about the material that has been recovered there, including some material from inside the object, from inside the craft that we can test. And we are doing that now. So by the way, we are going to be going to that at a conference that Paola is organizing November 11, 12, 13 in Laughlin, Nevada, and I’ll be there. And we’re going to talk about the details of all of that. The important thing with that case is when the kids were there for the following 10 days, it was their land, you know, and we know everything that the Army did. And I mean the Army was not prepared to recover something like this. Once they realized that it was real. It wasn’t their property. It was in public property. You know, it belonged to the father of Mr. Padilla. So they went to the house. And they asked, and again, in researching this, I’ve rediscovered a part of history of American history. And then forget the UFO, we can talk about that separately, but the historical data about the end of the war, about Japan, about the capitulation of Japan, about what would have happened, if we had had the atom bomb, about the testing of the atom bomb, which was not a test was a full scale, atom bomb. It was equal to the in power to the one that destroyed Nagasaki, Japan after Hiroshima, I didn’t realize all of that, I didn’t realize all the details of the science that had gone into this, how the testing was done, I had to learn all that. And fortunately now it’s over 50 years after that, the A-bomb. And a number of very good historical books have come out. So I bought all those books, and I read them cover to cover. And that sort of broadly, you know, brought me up to date. The kids had seen the explosion of the atom bomb. Jose’s mother had been blinded in one eye by the explosion because she heard the sound. And she looked over the horizon, and she saw this, and the power of the light blinded her in one eye. So this is real, I mean, the Army people who came to talk to the father of Sr. Padilla were speaking Spanish. You know, the army officers were there in New Mexico, of course they were bilingual, you know, and the conversations were in Spanish. And part of the population was Indian ,was American Indian. So we’ve reconstructed all of this, and you know, all the books about Trinity they talk about, you know, Professor Oppenheimer, they talk about Dr. Enrico Fermi, they talk about the physics, they forget everybody. When the physicists were there for four years, then they went back to the University of Chicago or wherever, you know, teaching atomic physics after that. The people who were there, they stayed there, and the population had been exposed to a lot of radioactivity, the same amount of radioactivity that was exposed at Nagasaki. Nobody knows that, nobody talks about that. Everybody says there was a test, when a test in science is, you know, you take a little vial, and you make a couple of liquids. And then you take a spectrum photograph, and that’s a test. If it works, you get a patent and so this was not a test. This was an explosion at ground level, which is the worst thing they could have done. And after the Project Manhattan, you know, at White Sands they reset the explosion of the bomb in altitude to minimize radioactivity in Japan. So that the Japanese, I don’t think the Japanese are going to send flowers to the US Army because of that, but they wanted to minimize radioactivity on the ground. That’s not what the bomb was supposed to, I mean, that wasn’t the main military use of the bomb, the bomb was, in it was heat and the explosion, it wasn’t the radioactivity. And at that test, you know, 20 miles from that, that property 20 miles from that land is where they realized the mistake of blowing the bomb on the ground. Also, the bomb was four times more powerful than the calculation. Okay. So, learning that, it was for a scientist like me, it’s like a dream, you know, to be able to get that information, much of which comes from the Army brochures, it’s not in any books,but now it’s in our book, the Trinity book. So we learned a lot as a result of that, and we’re humbled by the experience. The Army had to make a break in the fence. So they had to ask permission to do that, to open the fence. Mr. Padilla said, well, there is an opening for the cattle, you know, why don’t you use that? They said, no, we need a bigger opening and we need a bigger truck. So I had a little fight with Paola because I wanted to know what kind of truck it was. And she said, why do you need to know that? I mean, that’s not the story. You know, the stories of those little kids where they saw the aliens, I mean, the craft, I said, Yeah, but, you know, I need to know the weight of the craft. And the truck is going to tell me, you know, how much the craft weighed. The kids try to move it. Remember, they were there, even when the soldiers went for lunch or dinner, you know, the kids were all there on the property, they knew how to hide, they would leave their horses in the back. They were fascinated day after day after day. And in the book, there is a table of what happened every day on that property. And so the human story is extraordinary. And physics stories are extraordinary. Because on the last day, there was nobody watching the object, the object was on the truck. By the way, the truck was an 18 wheeler. So the thing was not a weather balloon. The army officer who came in to talk to the father said, you know, we need to recover our weather balloon. And he said, Oh, you know, I’ve got weather balloons for you. Because the properties 80,000 acres. And science was launching weather balloons every day, to know the direction of the wind and so on for the aircraft. By the way, there was no Air Force at the time. You know, they were pilots, but they were attached to the Army. It was the Army Air Force. We’re two years away from President Truman declaring the independent Air Force for America. So, he had the weather balloons when he was picking up that he was keeping to return them to the army. And so he brought them an armful of weather balloons. And they said, No, no, it’s a special weather balloon. Well, my estimation is between four and a half tons and five tons. Again, the kids tried to move it when it was on the truck ready to go. It was on the side because if it had been upright, it wouldn’t have gone under the overpass on the highway. You know, the Transamerica Highway that goes through San Antonio, and so they could see the underside. And on the underside, there was no opening. And there were no propellers. There were no jets. There was no opening. What makes it work? I mean, what’s the propulsion system? So that case is a treasure for us, you know, back in California, in Silicon Valley, it’s a treasure of information. We know the weight. We know the dimensions. The kids measured it. They were clever kids and you grew up quickly in those days, you know? Now I’m almost as old as Mr. Padilla, he’s 85, I’m 82. I was born in 1939, in occupied France. I remember the end of the war, I remember my parents house being destroyed by a bomb. I remember watching the German’s shooting down American planes. I mean, there was no place to hide. I saw that, okay. So in those days, you know, I was five and a half by the end of the war in Europe, war in Japan wasn’t finished, okay. So you have to go back to those days to really understand what went on. Kids were growing up quickly, then, you know, I mean, this was serious. This was serious for them. This was not a joke. And their memory, this was seared into their memory. And we were able to check it very well, because one of their cousins was younger, and she came to that land several years later. So by then the two young men had grown up and gone on. But she was there with the father. And the father was still picking up objects on the property that had strange physical properties that are very similar to what was recovered two years later at Roswell. So we have a continuity now. And it gives us a point of, you know, the starting point for the UFO crashes and landings. In the United States it didn’t start in 47. It started in New Mexico, on the land of Project Manhattan in August 1945.
George Knapp
The witnesses, the kids who walk up to this craft, it digs a big trench in the land. And there’s a hole in it, they see three creatures inside that are alive, they had an emotional response that was seemingly generated, right?
Jacques Vallée
I had the benefit of the transcripts that Paola had recorded. I’ve learned in my work with computers with the internet and so on that analyzing transcripts and terms that people use and so on, because we built one of the very early social networks on the internet, my team did. So we analyzed the behavior of people using a computer conferencing system for the first time. And the terms they use are very interesting, obviously, they were there to try to help quote the pilots, they realize that there are no pilots, there are these creatures, the creatures don’t look at them, but their mind fills up with images that seem to come from. So there is a form of communication that they’ve never experienced before. And they are going to have dreams, recurring dreams for several years after that. Mr. Padilla told me that for about three years, he would wake up in sweat in the middle of the night, going back to that time, and seeing things falling from the sky and seeing people dying, a feeling of tragedy, and then he would wake up, okay. Those images stay with them and that’s why the little one is crying, does not want to go anywhere. Jose Padilla told us, I wanted to go there, but you know, if I had gone there, I wouldn’t be here talking to you. You know, I wouldn’t be giving this interview now. And that was very powerful. And as you know very well, George, that’s something that you hear in many cases of that form of neural, for lack of a better word, telepathic or psychic communication with people who are close to these objects.
George Knapp
I think we got time for one more question where you have to shut down here. So yeah, they had an emotional response, not only of their own reaction to the scene, but seemingly they had a mind meld with these beings. Are there similar cases around the world where that has happened before?
Jacques Vallée
So in the book, and again, before we go, the book is called Trinity: The Best-Kept Secret. The best kept secret because we kids were too impressed to talk about it for over 50 years, and for other reasons we could go into. This was never reported to the Air Force. So this is not in Blue Book. Dr. Hynek never knew about this case. It went to the atomic secrets, which are kept separate from all the other secrets in the United States. They’ve never come out. So we would never know about it if Paola had not done that interview. Now in the book, we talk about two other cases. The one in Socorro that you know well and I know well because I studied it with Dr. Hynek at Northwestern at the time. And a case in France at Valensole that had also that type of communication, but the witness there was a former soldier of the resistance in France. He was in his 40s by then. This is a case in 1968, July 1 1968, when he was faced again with an oval object. In Socorro it’s not a flying saucer, it’s an avocado. In Valensole in France, you know, in the Alps, at the foot of the Alps in France. It’s also an egg shaped object. All three. And there is a figure in the book comparing them and comparing the dimensions. So those are not flying saucers. And in all three cases there is that psychic impulse that the witnesses don’t quite know how to deal with.
George Knapp
We’re talking with Jacques Vallée about a book he co-wrote with Paola Harris, Trinity: The Best-Kept Secret. Jacques, in 1945, the Trinity bomb goes off, the world is changed forever. A month later, something comes looking at that site, something shows up at that site looking around. Does it make sense to you that a non-human intelligence wherever it’s from, would be interested in what was going on in New Mexico back then, given that so many different sites in that state were doing atomic projects and testing missiles and things of that sort. And intelligence, even human intelligence would be interested in, but a non human intelligence, wherever it’s from, would want to check this out? This test, in fact, could have been like a beacon announcing to the universe that we’ve arrived in the Atomic Age.
Jacques Vallée
This was a turning point in human history, you know, in 10,000, 100,000 years of human development of civilization, development, there had never been anything like it. There had been wars, there had been things like that. But never something of that power, that could be seen from outer space, could be detected. Is that the reason why that object showed up? The fact is that ever since we have not used an atomic bomb in war. It was very tempting to terminate the only war in Korea with a bomb. It must have been very tempting to use other types of atomic or nuclear weapons in war. Came very, very close to that in Cuba during the Cuban crisis. Another story that hasn’t been told very much when it came within minutes of a nuclear exchange in Cuba. So the reason is that, because there was that form of communication, I mean, this was something that the American Army could not miss, the thing was deposited there, there was no explanation for, believe me, we’ve tried to think of every way this could be a hoax. But you don’t hoax a flying avocado, weighing five tons, that is going to hit a communication tower, take it out of communication, and then land under power, and essentially, create an avenue the size of a football field, under power. What kind of hoax is that? I mean, if you could do that, think of all the other things you could do, rather than joking about it. Again, we have two witnesses who are smart, who had binoculars to follow everything that was going on, they knew how to use it, those were professional binoculars. Why did the kids have binoculars? Well, you know, people will say, Well, you know, kids are playing with binoculars, they were not playing with binoculars. The property’s 80,000 acres and you have cattle there, they needed to read the brands on the cattle from a distance. So those were good, as good as the Army binoculars and they knew how to use them. And they were passing the binoculars back and forth to check on what they were seeing. Those who are excellent observers, Mr. Padilla went on to be a highway patrolman after being at war in Korea. He has two bullets in his body, one from the war, and one from someone that he was arresting as a cop in California as a highway patrol officer. These are serious people, this is not a joke. It was to me just an extraordinary experience to work, to have the opportunity to work with Paola on this case. To me, the witnesses, Mr. Padilla and Sabrina Padilla later gave us the other information. I asked Mr. Padilla why was it so important for you to go in and get something because he went into the object on the last day, the beings were gone, we don’t know where they went, if they were taken by the army, or if they were recovered by their own guide or whatever. There is a gap of 24 hours where we don’t know what happened. They found a bracket, he found Jose was alone inside described the inside to me very precisely. There was a panel on the wall of the object. We don’t know what else had been there because the Army had cleaned up everything, of course, they could find. But this was attached to the wall of the object. And there was a bracket that could turn and he managed to rip it out. And went away with it. And we have it, he donated it to us, and we’re going to be donating it to a university for further study. Well, I said why was that so important? And he said, Well, in those days, everybody was wanting to have a souvenir. Now, up to then, we’ve spoken occasionally Spanish, and most of the time English. Souvenir is a French word. And that struck me. Why do you call that a souvenir? He said, Well, you know, so many people died in the war. They were not coming back. You know, brothers, uncles, fathers. And it was very important for a family in many cases they couldn’t get the body. It was very important for the family to have something to remember them by and that’s what we call the souvenir. So that’s how that French word sort of came into the language in Mexico 1945. Well, nobody spoke French and so those are the little things that are important you know should be important to a historian.
George Knapp
They called it a treasure too, right? A Spanish word for treasure.
Jacques Vallée
They call it the tesoro, the treasure.
George Knapp
And it’s a cool story in the book, Trinity, about how they held onto that. They put it to use. For all these years they had a use for that piece that they took out of a crashed vehicle.
Jacques Vallée
Yes, well they were hiding it. We’re fighting about, with my colleagues, about whether this thing is important or not. It’s a bracket similar to many brackets you can buy for a spout of a well. In fact, I bought one. This is kind of heavy. It’s usually in an alloy of aluminum or something else. This one I got from a shop. So they turn around an axis and they activate their actuators here that are attached to different parts of a well or you know, a particular machine. So those things have been around since the 30s or the 40s, 1930s. And so it’s not very unusual. The question is what was it doing there? So my theory is, well, the army brought it to wind up something, maybe a wire to work at night or whatever, there is no electricity there. I used to have a Jeep to do my own UFO investigations. And the Jeep can generate power. It was bringing power to the battlefield and so on. So that could have come from that. They could have needed power inside the object to clean it up or whatever they did inside at night. My friends disagree, because there are some very, very unusual aspects to that bracket. Yeah, you can buy a bracket, almost like it, you know, at some, some hardware store. But this is a little bit different. So we are still investigating that and arguing about that. So there is research being done on that instrument.
George Knapp
The kids picked up some pieces of what they just, it’s sort of like memory foil similar to Roswell. They picked up that, they put some of it to work in a windmill, right? They stash it away, and then they had it on the windmill.
Jacques Vallée
Yes, they found a strip of memory metal and at one time it was a water mill for, you know, a well, and the father told them to try to fix some parts that were not working. And they couldn’t fix it. And the shop couldn’t fix it. And they thought of this memory metal. They wrapped it up around the axle, and put the thing back together. And it worked for many years. So yes, it was, unfortunately, we don’t have it now. But if you remember, I mean, that shows up also at Roswell. And now we could trace it to some, there were a few places in the US that were looking for that kind of material. You know, Battelle Memorial Institute has been very involved in the UFO study on the dark side. And, you know, they developed a type of memory metal that’s much like that. The question is, would it have been in existence at Roswell? 1947, maybe. 1945? Well, you know, that’s really pushing it. Did we have that kind of technology? Or is it alien technology? We don’t know. We don’t know that. So we’re continuing to look into that in the lab, though, in a real lab,
George Knapp
The Army came looking for scraps and pieces and asking people Hey, did you find any? They wanted it back. Right?
Jacques Vallée
They wanted it back. And that’s what makes us think that it’s not just another bracket that you can get at a hardware store in New Mexico somewhere. The dimensions, there are holes, in the real one, there are holes like this, for an axle and so on. The dimensions are in centimeters in the metric system. The Army, US Army was not using the metric system in any parts that they had in 1945. So it wasn’t an Army part. It could have come from Mexico. Mexico, I believe, uses the metric system based on the French trades. But that’s very curious. So we’re not at the end of that, we’re at the beginning of that study, and the book, again, Trinity, is just talking about the beginning of it. We have a lot of work to do still.
George Knapp
You went to the site multiple times. You looked for bits and pieces. Did you find bits and pieces somewhere in the ground?
Jacques Vallée
No. But we heard accounts, the thing that they found was sort of angel hair. They call it angel hair or light fiber. Well, it’s not a light fiber like we use now in communication. Or remember the book by Colonel Corso, Corso describes some of the same things. So we know the kids are not lying, but also talks about that stuff from Roswell and other places two years later. Now we have references to that, in 1945. That’s important. The kids used it to decorate Christmas trees, because it glowed in the dark. Well, you know, the fiber today, electronic fiber doesn’t glow in the dark. You put a little bit of light at one end, it comes out at the other end the speed of light, or some fraction of the speed of light. So it’s great for the computer. But if you look at the fiber, you’re not going to see the fiber glowing. And also, it wasn’t a fiber, straight fiber. It was a bundle, like a spiderweb of fibers that were glowing. There were other things that were glowing like that and they have been irradiated. But if they were irradiated, why would they still glow five years later. That doesn’t make any sense. So, again, in terms of physics, it’s extremely interesting.
George Knapp
Where the craft came to rest, there was a noticeable indentation there in the ground that you can see for a long time. And as you note in the book, Trinity, somebody came in and planted a bunch of these plants that are poisonous.
Jacques Vallée
They are poisonous and are poisonous to cattle. So why would you, I could understand wanting to keep people away from it. The people who’ve gone there, there are some people from MUFON who were brought there to help in the investigation. They came back with rashes, you know, and Jose Padilla still has a rash on his arm that’s sort of permanent, like a scar. So those plants were very poisonous. They are not used anywhere else. I mean, they are not native to New Mexico. Why would you go to the trouble to put a plant like that, where it could actually harm the cattle. We don’t know why that was there. It’s not there now. But they’ve also brought dirt on top of that. So now anything that would have been at the surface then is under 15 feet of dirt now, I don’t think the state of New Mexico is going to let you bring a bulldozer and level that up because it’s a place where if it washes off, is going to take a lot of debris over the highway, you know, which is you know, transcontinental highway. So there are a number of earth dams there all over the place to stop the, you know, the water when it pours. If you’ve ever been in a downpour in New Mexico you know that can be pretty bad.
George Knapp
A lot of interest in metamaterials, pieces picked up from alleged crash sites. You know, there’s always been interest in that. But it’s heightened right now. You’ve been involved, very quietly, in this work for a long time and testing samples, can you give me your general sense of how promising that is, and does a physical piece have to be unobtainium to be important doesn’t have to be element 115 or some undiscovered element in order to be important and suggest that it’s not ours, that somebody else made it or used it?
Jacques Vallée
Well, element 115 has been discovered. The problem is it only exists for one millionth of a second, I don’t think you can buy a bucket of it. But the, I’ve had that discussion again, with scientists who know more about materials than I do. It’s a very complex area. The fight I have with them is, look, the most advanced car in the world is the Toyota hydrogen car, which I can buy down the road here in San Francisco. And I’ve looked at it. When it was demonstrated by the president of Toyota on the stage, the car was running. And the President of Toyota explained the technology that went into the car, and why this eliminated the need for all these poisonous batteries that we talk about. The battery as being good for the environment, well, the car is clean, but the battery isn’t. The battery has lead and cadmium and things that you know, will kill natural things. So it’s terrible. Hydrogen is a clean, I mean, hydrogen is the most abundant element in the cosmos, it’s pretty hard to extract it from water, but we know how to do it. So we could start an industry that would do that. This would be great for the oil companies, because, you know, they reject hydrogen, they can’t sell it to anybody. So this would be, you could do the huge industry around hydrogen. So the President of Toyota explains all that. And then he turns to the car, he’s got a glass under the tailpipe where water has been dripping, because the only exhaust from the hydrogen car is pure water. It recombines hydrogen with oxygen to power the car. And the result is water. So the water drops out of the tailpipe. He takes a glass and drinks it. Now you’ve been in television for a long time, you know, that’s an effective demonstration. Your question is absolutely right. I mean, why do we assume that a craft from somewhere else will have very, very esoteric components, maybe they just use hydrogen. Whatever they use, it doesn’t have an exhaust because again, the kids. The object was about 14 feet tall, 14 – 15 feet high. And there was a floor. So I asked Jose when he was inside, what kind of floor was it? Well, the floor was flat. Okay. So they went to the trouble of having a flat floor in this avocado sized object. From the calculation, there would be about two and a half feet under the floor, over maybe seven or eight feet where you could put an engine. There is no opening. Okay. There were some bumps under the thing. It wasn’t damaged, by the way. So it must have been extremely hard. Because again, it plowed an avenue all the way down the hill. It wasn’t broken. There was no break. There was some friction traces. But it wasn’t open. We don’t know what was inside. And if there is a propulsion system, it’s got to be inside. How do you do that? So again, the craft was taken over, it would have been taken over by Project Manhattan. That’s the Atomic Energy Commission. And we have one more proof of where it went. Ramy Baca was a little kid, grew up and went to Washington, he became involved in politics. And he was instrumental in getting the governor of the state of Washington elected. And one time when he was with her, she showed him the report from the Atomic Energy Commission about the object, she didn’t let him keep it or read it. But she showed him the official report. Now, in the secret system of the United States system of classified documents, you know, you’ve investigated, I’ve been exposed to it, there is the main system, which goes through the Pentagon. Confidential secret, top secret and the various flavors of secrecy on top of that, or aside from that. Then there is the foreign foreign intelligence secrets which go through the State Department, primarily, mainly in the diplomatic sequence, not the CIA secrets, but the diplomatic would go to the State Department. And then from there, on request, on need, they will be supplied to the White House or to Congress on the need to know basis. But then there is a third type of classification, which is R, P, and Q clearances. That are what you need to work if you’re a physicist to work at Livermore, at Lawrence Livermore at Los Alamos, and so on, those are the atomic secrets, there is no reason why people in the CIA should have those secrets, unless they work on atomic, nuclear secrets. So that’s why this is not in the Air Force files, not in the CIA files. This is not in anybody’s files, it never came out. It came out because we have the witnesses that we can talk about freely. But we would never get, unless you’re really inside the atomic secrets, you will never have permission to have access to that level of classification. And you wouldn’t know about it. The President would need to be told about it. Unless there was something that came up specifically on the topic, where today it would be the Secretary of Energy, who would have authority. Used to be the Atomic Energy Commission. And it changed names over the years, but that’s where it would be. And we also know from testimony from the man in charge of the government project in Canada, who was given a piece of something that had been shot by one of our pilots, a Navy pilot, over Washington in 1952. He had been, the Canadian guy had been given a piece of that and the American officer gave it to him, told him that this was classified higher than the atom bomb in the United States. Okay, so we know all that mean, this is not something where there is controversy. I mean, it’s all on record.
George Knapp
Why do you suppose this thing crashed, and are there other explanations that make sense for the other alleged crashes? For example, lightning, powerful radar, or are some of these crashes not crashes at all? Could it be that they’re made to look like a crash? So we’ve got a new toy to play with?
Jacques Vallée
I think somebody is trying to get our attention. And evidently, in this particular case, at Trinity, they got our attention. And I think that’s maybe why there has been so much caution about using nuclear explosions, nuclear bombs in war, in anger. Because that mystery has never been resolved.
George Knapp
It makes sense why a non-human intelligence would be interested in an atomic bomb going off, even somebody from outer space, some other system. You don’t necessarily believe that these visitors are from other planets? They could be. But is it possible that they live here? That they’re concerned about the planet because in a sense, they live here?
Jacques Vallée
Well, you know, in the 40s, and 50s, and 60s, I think it was legitimate to assume that if something like that was seen, that it would be a spacecraft, okay, because we were starting to build spacecraft, we had rockets, we’re still firing rockets bigger and better. We don’t have that technology. But we could assume that an advanced race somewhere could have something like that. If you talk to a physicist today, not a UFOlogist physicist, but just a straight down the line physics professor, he’ll say that’s not the only hypothesis you should look at. Because now we know, there could be parallel universes. There could be other forms of energy we haven’t discovered. And by the way, when I teach my class in physics, I teach quantum mechanics on Monday, and I teach general relativity on Tuesday. And there are a few bright kids who say, sir, you know, how come they don’t match? Okay, you just said that there were an infinity of dimensions. And then you talk about Einstein, and he doesn’t say that, okay. So, you know, come on, I mean, how do we resolve that? Well, somebody may have resolved that little problem, which we’ve never resolved since the days of Einstein. And, you know, so if you take that seriously, and physicists take that seriously, there could be like Dr. Hynek used to say in his lectures, there could be another Earth five minutes ahead of us, and there could be ways to jump from one to the other or to communicate from one to the other.
George Knapp
People will argue a secret like this cannot be kept. Something crashed at San Antonio, New Mexico. There were a lot of people who saw it. It can’t possibly be kept. The other crashes, Roswell, of course, a lot of things have leaked out about these cases over the years. But secrets can be kept. You worked in secrecy on this project, because you didn’t want UFOlogist to kind of poison the well before you got to write the book.
Jacques Vallée
Right, we knew that we were going to disclose it. But we will need to disclose the whole story. You know, we didn’t want to give people bits and pieces of things. Because even now people come in, and they’ve read something about it, and they say, well, they were kids, you know, kids lie all the time. Not those kids, not in 1945, not when you’re 20 miles away from the first nuclear explosion on Earth. Not when you have a father like Mr. Padilla you don’t joke about that. You go to that little diner, you know, well, I’d love to go there with you and get a hot dog over there. It’s full of the posters, loose lips kill. You know, I mean, those posters, those yellow posters, very emotional. You know, you talk about what something you’ve seen. You could get killed, you could get other people killed, and the kids grew up in that atmosphere. You know, they grew up with that. And so they didn’t talk when Roswell was all over TV. After all that they didn’t talk to Hynek. They didn’t talk to anybody. Because this was something that was too profound for them. And also, inside, they know, that’s very clear when you speak, even today with Jose, with Mr. Padilla, it’s still something that has changed his life that he remembers very clearly. You know, there is this argument among psychologists, what do kids remember? And the fact is that all of us sort of make up details, or we don’t exactly remember how things were. There were a few things when I was 3, 4, 5. I don’t remember anything before I was about two. But after that, you know, I remember the end of World War Two. I remember what I saw, I was very fortunate that my father had been an officer in World War One. He knew when there was danger. Usually there was danger, because things are flying from the sky. But he knew we couldn’t hide anywhere. And there was never a sense of fear in my parents, so I wasn’t exposed to that kind of fear of the war. The things I saw, I saw at a distance. I wasn’t there when the house was blown up. We must have been in a shelter somewhere. We did have shelters. There was no house when we came out. I remember that. There are things like that yeah, you may have been three at the time, but they come back exactly as they happened. Now, I couldn’t tell you what I did afterwards. It’s not a normal memory that extends with a before and after. This is just three frames of the film.
George Knapp
So much interesting research. going on right now. We’re learning so much more. A week ago today, some of your former colleagues or current colleagues, Colm Kelleher, Jim Lacatski, and I put out a book about AAWSAP. I don’t believe you’ve ever made any public comments about AAWSAP separate from AATIP, that was something different, but is there anything you want to say about the work you did? They praise the computer database that you created.
Jacques Vallée
That was the main product of the project. They make that clear in the book, there were a number of people working on it, all I can do is confirm what their book says. I mean, it’s accurate. I’m surprised at how accurate it is. Because you know, that database exists. And it’s not really a database, it’s a data warehouse with a number of parallel stovepipes because you can describe when a pilot has seen the same way as a kid or a trucker or radar. So you have to have a structure that cuts across and preserves the unique stovepipe parameters of an aircraft, you know, another type of site. So that’s what we built, I designed it. The credit should go to Lieutenant Colonel Kurth, who led the team that took it over from me, I transferred it to them after the design was done. What was done was only 1/3 of the work. The plan was then to build another layer of authentication of the entire data warehouse, which were about 200,000 cases. But you know, 200,000 records you can put in your cell phone today. So, it’s not a big database. What’s big is that every record was very long and complex, okay. And that took time to dig up, validate, and translate from other languages. We had translators, interpreters and so on on the staff, and they were trained on what to look for, what to recognize. And then so it is pretty big at the end of the day, and then there was a third layer that I designed and never implemented of AI on top of it. You need to use artificial intelligence, that’s the proper use of AI to make sense of all the data.
George Knapp
Are you encouraged by the renewed interest among Congress, in the media?
Jacques Vallée
Yeah, I knew you were going to ask that George. Yes, of course. Well, I’m encouraged by the fact that, you know, we’ve gotten two steps ahead. We’ve removed all the stigma. I mean they have astronomy at Harvard, embracing UFOs. Now that’s never happened before. You remember the days of Dr. Menzel, Dr. Menzel said, You’re crazy to do this, you know, I remember when these guys went on TV saying, we shouldn’t spend a penny on this stuff. Well, it’s wonderful to see the scientific community waking up to that and say, Well, you know, maybe there is something to that. At the time of the Condon report, I left the United States. I left behind an offer of a job heading up a department at Northwestern of AI. My PhD in 1967 was one of the first, I think it was the second PhD about AI, applied to science, after one PhD at one project at Stanford called Dendro that had to do with chemistry, mine had to do with astrophysics. And it worked. Okay, so this one 1967. Well, it’s appropriate to apply that technology to that. So we’re making progress in that direction, finally. But we’ve also taken one step back, the step back like, now, if it’s real, it has to be classified. I don’t believe that. I believe it is real. I believe there are some legitimate classified issues. There were a few classified cases in Blue Book, very few. When I asked Dr. Hynek about it, he laughed. And he said, Yeah, well, you know, I can tell you what the UFO was. It was, you know, a light that lady saw in the sky. I said, Why does it have to be classified? We’re sending this memo to the White House, that this housewife has seen a light in the sky? He said, Yeah, well, but you know, she shouldn’t have been there in that particular place where she was. When she saw it, the place was classified. There is a case, that’s classified, from a navy ship, a small ship, that looks like a fishing ship. It wasn’t a fishing ship. And their radar and with the naked eye, they saw a UFO they reported. Unfortunately, they were within a mile and a half of North Korea, it was a spyship. Oh, well, if you put it on TV, you’re going to expose the intelligence operation. The fact that they weren’t out there looking for UFOs, they had to report it because it interfered with their instrument, so they’re going to report it by the book. And by the way, they never stopped, that never stopped when people say Blue Book stopped. Yeah, but pilots continued seeing things when they were reporting them because they could have been intruders from Russia, from wherever. So those things never stopped. And that sort of public has all these false ideas about it. So that should not be. If we’re serious about that, we should declassify most of that. We should declassify the data warehouse and all of that. I can’t really talk beyond about that project, even though I architected it and turned it over to Lieutenant Colonel Kurth, who actually ran the project. So he should get the credit for that and Colm, oversaw all of that, Colm Kelleher. But I was there at the beginning as the architect, and I would have been re-engaged. If the project had continued to build the AI, which I had designed already.
George Knapp
Jacques, the public has been hearing about AATIP, Lue Elizondo, all of his colleagues for about four years now and we know that that effort had a very narrow focus. Military encounters with UFOs, nuts and bolts craft. AAWSAP, as we’re now learning from that book, had a much broader focus. It looked at UFOs. But it also looked at other weird phenomena that seemed to occur in the proximity of UFO events. Can the issues, and the big questions about UFOs, UAP, visitors, other intelligences really ever be answered by only looking at the narrow view? Or do we need to have, as weird as it is, an honest look at all the other truly strange stuff that come along for the ride?
Jacques Vallée
We need both George. We need the new stuff. The reason it’s so focused, is that in the last five years, we’ve developed equipment, which is unique at catching unknowns. It’s catching them, we’re not looking for unknowns, we’re looking for Russian jets, or Chinese jets. But in the last five years there have been these infrared cameras under the wing of F-18s, and other equipment and better radar. The radars on the Princeton were experimental radars, they were the very latest. So in the last five years, we’ve gotten data that the scientists can look at, that military specialists can look at, and military contractors can work on that. So if it catches a UFO, then we’re going to get a lot of data on UFOs. That’s your hope. We’re not quite there yet. Although I trust, you know, I’ll tell you who I trust, I trust the pilots with their eyes. Commander Fravor and the other pilots who actually saw the thing with their eyes, I trust that. Electronics, you know, there are a lot of things about electronics that have not been talked about in that Nimitz case about how fast a thing goes from one place to another? Well there are a lot of things you can make happen to a signal that people may or may not be cleared to know about. I bumped into it just in my, you know, work in venture capital, looking at advanced electronics. You see these patterns, you see these articles about some aspects of that, and you see if somebody’s got a technology that could do those things. At some point, it’s going to be a civilian technology to have an application in civilian equipment. Until then, you know, it’s behind the fence somewhere. But there is a memo from Raytheon to the Navy, it is a multi-page memo. They don’t say there are no UFOs you know, Raytheon makes the infrared camera. They said we sold you that infrared camera. And yes, it works. And you know, we’re proud of that. But be careful what you say about the images we give you. Because you told us, you gave us a contract to deliver an infrared camera. Everybody talks about the images and about the pictures. Oh, that Yeah. Okay, that’s a picture. It’s really an infrared image of a temperature target. It doesn’t tell you how far it was. It doesn’t tell you how fast it goes. It doesn’t tell you any of that. It’s to distinguish a bioreactor from a single reactor, enemy aircraft. Okay. So you’re, you’re looking at a temperature signature of a target. You know, it’s designed for war, designed for aerial combat. It’s not designed to chase unknown things in the universe. Okay. So they made it very clear. Yes, but be careful what we tell you. If you’re talking about distance, you have to have another way of measuring the distance. So you have to match it to a radar return somewhere. You can’t just say this was 15 miles away because we’re not telling you that. If it was a MiG, maybe you could say something about that. But if you suspect it’s a UFO, if you gave us the characteristics of a UFO, we could design a very good camera to track that. Now that’s what the contract said. Okay. So it’s a classic memo. It’s a great engineering memo. Now, people have extrapolated in all directions about how fast they went and how they disappeared? Well, there are lots of ways to make your signal disappear from a device, you know, including a television set, including this screen. So let’s not go there. The larger picture is that we know, from the experience with Blue Book, that military cases are at best 10% of all the reports. Some farmer in his field sees something, the kids in San Antonio see something that falls before them, that’s not going to be reported to the Pentagon. Why should they? Okay. If it’s a bomber, and they detect something like a B-52, detecting something, yes, the record will go to, you know, the standard list, you know, White House, NSA, CIA, Department of Defense, Coast Guard, whatever that’s designed to do is to go there. And nobody decides where it goes, you push a button, it goes to all of them. And that’s a military system that’s only 10% of the database, and the other 90% of people, civilians, reporting it to whoever, to a journalist, to their mother to whatever, to the newspaper, usually, and that may or may not come to our attention. And then there is the rest of the world. I mean, the US landmass is 4% of the rest of the world, the other 97% or 96%, well, half of it is the Pacific Ocean. But, you know, there are a lot of other countries such as France, Russia, which is many, eight times bigger than the US. What happens there? What happens in Japan? What happens in China? All of that we don’t have, we have some data, but we don’t have enough data. So if we’re going to say something global about the phenomenon affecting mankind, we’ve got to look at everything, we can just work from that exquisite little thing that the Pentagon has, you know, from AAWSAP, or whatever that project was called at any other time. So I think the BAASS was right way to do it, augmented by what we can get from the classified data.
George Knapp
Yeah, you have to be willing to look at experiences and reports in their totality. Not just at what was the craft, how did it fly? Because as you have documented and written about for so many years, Passport to Magonia, that these creatures that we now call aliens may have been, what previous generations called elves or fairies or gnomes, or, you know, this interaction that this other intelligence has had with us, for all of our existence. It’s not easily categorized, and you can’t just solve it by studying flying saucers.
Jacques Vallée
I worked for a few years with a cultural anthropologist, who was also a psychiatrist, a real psychiatrist, and a full university professor. And he said, You know, I want to know, you know, does this only happened in the US and these little creatures, you know, and any stories? Yeah, there are stories like that in an English folklore, the fairies and so on. But you know, so he went to the library, and he came back and said, You know, there is no book, other than Passport to Magonia about the global thing about these creatures, but they are in every anthropology book, as a footnote. You know, they say, by the way, you know, on the way to exploring this pyramid, the camel driver said that they was the story in his family of 100 years ago, they saw a little elf, they saw a little creature, and those creatures always described in the same way. They are pretty mischievous. They breathe our air like the one in San Antonio. They are about four feet tall and they can do all these magical things. Sometimes they are invisible. And you’d be surprised. You know, a few years ago, I was at a panel at a financial conference in Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia, everybody’s wearing these robes, so on. And then President Clinton was there giving an address, the former prime minister of UK was there giving a speech and so on. And we had a panel on UFOs. The organizers thought that it would be interesting since the world press was going to be (there) to have another subject that would sort of open the minds of people. So Stanton Friedman was there, there were a number of scientists. And so I had a friend in Saudi Arabia, that I had met in Silicon Valley was a young man, a graduate student, who had been at Stanford for a while. And he was a son of a prominent family in Riyadh. So he knew I was coming to be on that panel, about UFOs, with Stanton Friedman, and so on. So he invited me to his house. And that was very interesting, because I met, you know, I didn’t meet any women there, even his mother, but I met his father, his uncle, cousins of his, and so on. They had a place in the desert, even though Riyadh is a very massive modern city, they are still thinking of themselves as desert people. So they had a compound in the desert, when we went to spend the afternoon and the evening, they wanted to talk about UFOs. These were sophisticated people, they had degrees in physics or engineering, they had been pilots in the Saudi Air Force, which flies American jets. They knew how radar works, and so on. So we are eating mutton with our hands, sitting on a carpet, and they want to talk about UFOs. And we got into this thing about the, you know, and I said that in your tradition, you have these little people, the serfs, you know, I mean, in the Quran, God didn’t just create men, and angels, he also created men, angels, and serfs. And jinns, you know, the jinns, which we call serfs, or whatever in Europe, the jinns could do many of these magical things, you know, they could appear and disappear. They could be short people they could do. And you have these ancient traditions. And my young friend said, What, ancient traditions? I mean, we still have them now. And I said, Well, you know, this is modern Saudi Arabia, I mean, you’re building skyscrapers, and you have all these oil companies, and you have modern technology. And you’re telling me, you have jinns? Well, what a cousin of mine was in the kitchen in my house. And he needed the part that was on the stove. So he took the part and emptied the hot water outside, you know, by the door. And then what he didn’t know was that there was a jinn there, he couldn’t see the jinn. But when you do that, you’re supposed to say, dear jinn, if you’re there, I’m going to pour some hot water. So I don’t want to hurt you. And the jinn will disappear for good? Well, the young man was taken over by the jinn. And he suddenly became crazy, talked in a strange way, couldn’t function. And they didn’t know what to do. Psychiatrics to be of no help. They called an Imam. They have special Imams who are trained just like in the Catholic Church, people who can talk to a demon, and exorcise a demon. Well, so this man came, did some ritual, set the young men in front of him, and address the jinn and said to the jinn, you know, we were sorry, this happened. He did not mean to do that to you. He didn’t mean to pull the hot water out of the kitchen. And he would like to go back to a normal life as a human. Would you please free him? And the young guy came back to normal. Now this is today in a modern country, talking to people who fly jets and do engineering and go to conferences with Bill Clinton, okay? This is not strange folklore from way back. The story I’m telling you, this is just 10 years ago in a modern country. So come on, I mean, this has been with us for a long time. Is it the same thing? I mean, that’s the real question. Is it the same thing? Or is it just a new evolution of the same thing? Are there other creatures that can go in and out of our reality? Well, you know, religion says that, every religion says that. So the problem is, again, we can’t take it to the lab. But now maybe we can, you know, thanks to Paola, thanks to Mr. Padilla. And thanks to that, we’re going to get that object to talk. We’ve got the lab to do it.
George Knapp
Jacques, always great to talk to you. The book with Paola Harris is Trinity: The Best-Kept Secret. It’s a terrific book and it’s a page turner. It’s an adventure story. And as always, with your work you are meticulous and documented and each step of the way, how you respond to certain questions. I love it. I love it.
