Jacques Vallée

Jacques Vallée is an astronomer and computer scientist who worked on the early ARPANET and on Mars mapping, then spent six decades studying UFO reports. He assisted J. Allen Hynek during Project Blue Book, wrote Passport to Magonia (1969), which compared modern sightings to folklore, and proposed that the phenomenon behaves like a control system acting on human belief rather than a fleet of visiting spacecraft. He was a model for the French scientist in Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

Vallée's contribution is a body of catalogued cases and a set of hypotheses, not a claim of privileged knowledge. His 2022 paper with Garry Nolan on material samples reported unusual isotope ratios in fragments of uncertain origin and drew criticism for the samples' chain of custody. He has also written about the 1953 'Pentacle memorandum', a Battelle letter proposing a controlled study, which he found in Hynek's files.

The corpus interviews Vallée once, in an episode presenting him as the person who has seen more evidence than anyone, and cites him throughout as the field's most careful theorist. The knowledge base records his career and publications as documented and his interpretive models as hypotheses he himself labels as such.