Vallee, Jacques Francis (1939-)

French scientist and authority on Unidentified Flying Objects. He was born September 24, 1939, in Pontoise, France and attended the Sorbonne (B.S. mathematics, 1959), Lille University (M.S. astrophysics, 1961), and Northwestern University (Ph.D. computer science, 1967). He organized a computer company in northern California, and became a member of the editorial board of Telecommunications Policy.

While at Northwestern he became an associate of J. Allen Hynek and authored two important works in ufology, Anatomy of a Phenomenon (1965) and Challenge to Science: The UFO Enigma (1966). Vallee was quickly hailed as one of the most important theorists in the field and was said to be the original of the character "Lacombe" in Steven Spielberg's popular movie Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

Several years later, Vallee released Passport to Magonia (1969) in which he directed attention to the similarity of UFO reports to folklore. This volume was followed by others in the 1970s which tied some of his speculations concerning the non-physical nature of UFOs to political conspiracy theories and occultism. The Invisible College (1975) and Messengers of Deceit (1979) largely marginalized Vallee in the ufological community. There he remained through most of the 1980s, but he returned to the center with Confrontations (1990), an account of investigations of UFO-related deaths and various physical evidence cases.

Sources:

Hynek, J. Allen and Jacques Vallee. The Edge of Reality. Chicago: Regnery, 1975.

Vallee, Jacques. Anatomy of a Phenomenon: Unidentified Objects in Space, A Scientific Appraisal. Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1965.

——. The Invisible College. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1975.

——. Messengers of Deception. Berkeley, Calif.: And/Or Press, 1979.

——. Passport to Magonia. Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1969.

Reprint, Chicago: Contemporary Books, 1993.

——. UFO Chronicles of the Soviet Union. New York: Ballantine, 1992.

Vallee, Jacques, and Janine Vallee. Challenge to Science; The UFO Enigma. Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1966.