Jacques Vallee

Why We Should Start Listening to Jacques Vallée

by GDS

11/21/2025

By any standard measure Jacques Vallée should be one of the least mysterious figures in modern science. He is a computer scientist, an astronomer and one of the early architects of the internet. His work in information science helped lay the foundations for technologies billions of people use every day. He is articulate, rational and unmistakably grounded. Yet for more than half a century Vallée has also been a kind of quiet heretic, insisting that the phenomenon we casually call UFOs is far stranger than spacecraft in the sky, and far too important to be shrugged off by the rest of us.

Most people know the fictional version of him without realizing it. The bespectacled French scientist in Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind was modeled directly on Vallée. Spielberg chose him not because Vallée was a wild theorist, but because he represented an ideal of scientific openness. He was the researcher who followed the evidence even when it wandered outside familiar categories. In the mid-1970s, when the film was being developed, Vallée was already arguing that the phenomenon might not be extraterrestrial at all, but something more complex, more layered and more deeply woven into human experience than the idea of visiting starships could explain.

That view is as radical today as it was then. The current disclosure conversation tends to divide sharply into two camps. One is the nuts and bolts camp, focused on hardware, propulsion and radar traces. The other is the so-called woo camp, populated by experiencers, folklorists and people who speak comfortably about consciousness, altered states and the possibility that the phenomenon interacts with us on psychological or symbolic levels. Vallée is one of the few public thinkers who has spent a lifetime insisting that both camps are necessary and that neither alone can explain what is happening.

This is precisely why the world should be paying more attention to him. Vallée’s work reminds us that the phenomenon behaves like a mirror, reflecting whatever framework we try to impose upon it. When military observers track objects that defy known aerodynamics, we want better sensors. When individuals report encounters that resemble visions, myths or shared symbolic experiences, we want better anthropology. Across continents and across time the phenomenon refuses to stay in one box. Vallée’s point is not that there is a single answer but that the search for one demands humility and the courage to widen our frame.

That should not be controversial. Yet in the United States, public discourse around UAPs is usually polarized between panic and dismissal. Vallée has argued instead for calm curiosity, the same mindset that gave us breakthroughs in physics, medicine and cosmology. He often notes that the phenomenon might involve intelligences or realities we do not yet have the language to describe. That does not make the subject unserious. It makes it scientific, in the oldest sense of the word, when exploration meant stepping into the unknown without assuming the answers in advance.

We also cannot ignore that Vallée’s warnings have been remarkably consistent. He has cautioned against the temptation to turn UAPs into a new religion. He has criticized the simplistic extraterrestrial hypothesis for decades. He has called for responsible study, international cooperation and a willingness to accept that we may be dealing with something interactive, elusive and intentional. None of this comes from a fringe personality. It comes from a world class scientist who helped build the digital networks that now carry this very conversation.

If the last few years have shown anything, it is that the phenomenon is not going away. From military footage to congressional hearings to interstellar objects capturing global attention, we are living in a moment that demands seriousness. Vallée offers a model for how to approach it. Open minded but rigorous. Grounded but unwilling to look away from the strange. Focused on the nuts and bolts but unafraid to acknowledge the woo.

The world could use more of that balance. And it would be wise to start listening to the man who has been urging it for half a century.