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Forbidden Sketches: Hand-Drawn Artwork Inspired by the Published Journals of Jacques Vallée (Vol. 6/Part 1)

By red pill junkieon

In this post I will continue to share the sketches I drew on my personal journal which were inspired by the lecture of Jacques Vallée’s Forbidden Science journals. As I stated on the previous post, while I was reading Volume 5 (Pacific Heights) I was encouraged by a compliment received from Jacques himself about one of my sketches, so I felt compelled to be even more thorough with my ‘marginalia doodling’ and I hence devoted one entire sketchbook to Volume 6 (Scattered Castles).

Whenever I start a new sketchbook journal I drew a silly cover for it, along with the date to keep them organized. Who knows, maybe one day these too will be preserved at some university, just like Jacques’s files which he donated to Rice University’s Archives of the Impossible.

Typically, one of these sketchbooks (which contain around 100 sheets of paper) take me more than a year to fill. This one, on the other hand, was complete full in just over a month. So in a way I can confidently state Jacques’s memoirs endowed me with one of the most creative periods of my life. In fact, the difficult thing about it was not finding ideas about what to draw, but restraining from drawing sketches about every interesting thing I read. Since I had time and space constrains to consider, by halfway into the sketchbook I became much more selective, and when there were only a handful of empty pages left I became worried I was going to run out before completing the project.

Fortunately it all worked superbly well, but that also means there’s quite a lot of sketches from Vol. 6 to show. Hence why I decided to break them into a multi-part delivery, because I don’t expect anyone to spend 3 or more hours just going through these in one single sitting 😅.

So, without further ado, here are the sketches with a bit a commenting to provide some context to better understand them. Oh, and once again—these sketches reflect my personal opinion and no one else’s.

Enjoy!

At the beginning of the second decade of the XXIst century, Jacques investigated a close encounter in which witnesses saw three silvery disks at night in the desert. One of the disks shot a beam of light at a pickup truck, which apparently resulted in the death of the driver. This event seemed to also coincide with a story Jacques was told decades earlier, by another contact of his he identifies by the pseudonym of “Jim Irish” (was that a pun towards Bill English, a UFO personality from the 1980s?)
The Antelope Valley encounter involved an almost perfect description of a stereotypical flying saucer, sans the lights (this happened before the movie Close Encounters of the 3rd Kind was released).
The Antelope Valley witness had a long history of high strangeness encounters, including a ‘classic’ abduction event in which the aliens removed one of his eyes from his skull socket.
“Mr. Saël,” the person who wrote to Vallée to inform him about the Antelope Valley encounter (the witness was his brother) had himself a lifetime of high strangeness encounters of his own. In fact, paranormal events in his family seemed to run all the way back to his father, who had an strange encounter with a ‘man’ on a train who struck an odd conversation with him.
FS6 begins at the height of the the BAASS (AAWSAP) project, which seemed to have devoted a lot of resources trying to understand the events happening at the Skinwalker ranch, including the sightings of bipedal canids. The personnel stationed at the ranch or visiting it occasionally all got the distinct impression that the intelligence behind the phenomenon did not want them there…
The reports they kept getting from the county where the ranch is located were getting weirder and weirder. Not only are there dog-headed creatures roaming about, but they also HAUL ASS.
Here’s my rendition of the hairy creature encountered by a witness inside their home when they were young. I don’t care if they have cute Ewok like features, that would still scare the $#it outta me!
This was an interesting challenge: How to represent ‘the phenomenon’ without resorting to cliched tropes? I’m quite satisfied with my solution.
One of the things that become clear as you go through FS5 and 6, is that the claim Bigelow got rid of the Skinwalker ranch because paranormal activity had ceased to manifest was a blatant lie. In fact the activity was at an all time high, but it never manifested in the way the Bigelow people expected—some portal opening into another dimension, or a craft landing on the property. The reason Bigelow sold the property to Fugal were much more complex, and we’ll probably never learn the full story.
Although Jacques and his BAASS associates learned about the Tic-Tac event earlier than anyone else outside of the Navy, they never seemed to have been able to obtain official records about it.
In FS6 Jeff Kripal takes a more predominant role among the inner circle of Vallée’s collaborators. BTW the Don Quixote allegory is not that gratuitous, since elsewhere in his memoirs Jacques compares himself with the indefatigable slayer of windmills.
In the last two volumes of his memoirs, the figure of the enigmatic ‘secret UFO program’ also takes a bigger role. From all the fruitless attempts the BAASS group made in order to get access to ‘the hardware’ as they began to call it, and all the second-hand information they obtained about it (Eric Davis once talked to George Bush Sr. who seemed to have known a whole lot about it) two things become apparent: (1) Neither of these clandestine projects managed to go very far in their understanding of UFO ‘technology’, and (2) Most of their budget was probably spent keeping the secrecy around the materials and the project itself. All this reminds me of the allegory of the white elephant, and how it is said that in ancient India, when a Raja wanted to get rid of an annoying competitor instead of declaring open war or order their assassination, they would instead grant them the gift of a white elephant—both a great honor but also a great burden, because the animals are as delicate to maintain as they are absolutely useless in terms of labor like the more common pachyderms (hence why we still use the term “white elephant” to depict flashy projects which are a needless waste of resources). Maybe the aliens planted those crashed saucers as a test, in which case the keepers of the UFO secrets failed spectacularly…
If the handling of the UFO ‘hardware’ has been atrocious, the way the US government (and other nations) have dealt with the information they’ve obtained about the phenomenon is equally pitiful. Frankly, I honestly doubt a regimented bureaucratic system is equipped to deal with the non-structure nature of the UFO phenomenon, something I’ve speculated since I wrote my essay “Anarchy in the U.F.O.” for the UFOs: Reframing the Debate anthology.
So the story of BAASS can be resumed into the fruitless attempt to find a ‘WOW factor’ which could help them unlock the secrets of propulsion and anti-gravity (and also show their sponsors the need to keep the project and the $$ rolling) while at the same time waiting to see if they would be granted into the other side of the curtain, to get a glimpse into whatever it is the gatekeepers of the UFO secret keep hidden there.
…The response they kept receiving from the ‘gatekeepers’: “We only talk to people who’ve been granted access into secret access programs (SAP’s) so get lost!” Which is such childish behavior I was instantly inspired to make a homage to one of my favorite comic strips of all time. Maybe the ‘hardware’ is as illusory as a stuffed tiger who is also a little boy’s imaginary friend.
FS5 ends with the death of Janine, Vallée’s beloved wife of over 40 years. in Volume 6, Jacques meets Flamine, who would become his new wife and would accompany him in several trips to France in search of UFO witnesses and other adventures. They even visited the workshop of a modern day alchemist, which I find really cool.
The memory of Janine remains spread across the whole book in one way or another, though. Trips to Normandy to visit her tomb that would make Jacques to envision it as a trip to the past, when Janine was a country girl wearing wooden clogs to endure the harsh humid climate.
…Or episodes from her life, like a visit to a gypsy psychic in a town’s fair, in which she may have received a glimpse of her future. Then again, perhaps most country girls want to hear they will get married and travel all over the world, right?
UFO skeptic James Oberg, whom Vallé seems to respect.
In one part of his memoirs Vallée shows skepticism towards the concept of Reincarnation, yet in a visit to an ancient monastery caused him to imagine a past life living as one of the monks who worked there. I too like to imagine he was the venerated Abbot in charge of the scriptorium, while I was one of the monks who get scolded for painting a lot of weird shit on their illuminated manuscripts 😜
Some comment about Crowley on page 45 was a perfect excuse to draw LAM
One of the things I love about Vallée’s memoirs is how prescient he is about technological developments which will have a great impact in our society (this is, after all, a man who was writing emails before many of us were even born, and I was born in the 1970s!). Here he was warning us about the sinister turn the modern social network economy was taking, even before the arrival of Facebook and Twitter.
When it comes to people he disagrees (or dislikes) Vallée does not mince words to declare his opinion. Reading his memoirs, it is clear he didn’t hold the late Budd Hopkins in a very high esteem (can’t say I blame him).
Charles Fort, on the other hand, occupies a revered position in Vallée’s personal pantheon. As it should be.
Like Vallée, I too think there are a lot of relationships between the more extreme examples of what we still call ‘demonic possession’, and alien abductions.
Yes, we’ve all read or heard about saucers crashing in the desert. But what about saucers flying into the ground? Well, there ARE reports like that in Vallée’s archives, so what do we make out of that??
Vallée was invited to a conference in Riyadh in 2011 (Nick Pope and Stan Friedman were speakers also). Aside from Dune and Star Wars, I don’t think there are too many other examples of ‘Islamofuturism’ in Sci Fi, but I guess the Emirates are busy making their cities into weird futuristic landscapes.
Ernest O. Lawrence, head of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, where (according to Larry Lemke) some of the pieces of UFO hardware recovered in New Mexico were analyzed.
UFO and cattle mutilation investigator Chris O’Brien, who sadly passed away last year. I personally knew Chris and even met him IRL in 2013, so I pushed myself to do an extra-good job with this sketch.
The enigmatic ‘Jonathan Axelrod’ a.k.a. Jay Stratton. I gotta confess I have yet to read Skinwalkers in the Pentagon, so I really don’t know a whole lot about this guy, other than the fact his family reported seeing dogmen prowling in their backyard. So the only thing I can say about him at the moment is that in his photos he shows dead eyes, like a shark.
The late Senator and Majority Leader Harry Reid, the guy who got the ball rolling with AAWSAP. I still the circumstances surrounding that contract were shady (for starters, we don’t know if other companies bid to get the contract alongside Bigelow Aerospace, or if it was a quid-pro-quo deal between him and Bigelow in exchange for donation funds). I also resent the fact no one wanted to refute his allegations about Lue Elizondo because he was dying of cancer.
In March of 2011 the world was shocked by news of a tsunami in Japan which caused a radioactive emergency at the nuclear plant in Fukushima . This reminded Jacques of his old project at InfoMedia, when they were trying to coordinate work with plants on six countries and improve their safety protocols. The Japanese had assured Jacques and his colleagues that “their ancestral culture would never tolerate a nuclear accident” *Sigh*
A close encounter between a member of the British royal family and an alien? The literature is filled with such stories, but without further evidence they remain part of the folklore.
Hal Puthoff. As you may have realized by now, the way I approach the caricatures of these historical characters reflect quite a lot about my opinion of them. And I just can’t seem to muster a lot of respect for a scientist who’s wasted millions of dollars pursuing ‘Zero-point energy devices’ (which have never yielded tangible results) and who still continues to adhere to an antiquated ETH vision of the phenomenon despite all he’s learned about the real high strangeness of it, through his long association with NIDS and BAASS. Hence why I chose to take a bit of a jive at him through a popular fictional character from Star Trek, The Next Generation.
…Speaking of people I don’t have a lot of respect for, this sketch illustrated an episode that happened in June of 2011 when Seth Shostak (SETI’s former director and uberskeptic) attempted to contradict a statement made by Jacques about the government and radio telescopes. David Pescovitz (one of the founders of BoingBoing) used his computer kung-fu to defend Jacques’s honor and prove Shostak wrong (how I would have loved to witness that).
A comment made by Christopher ‘Kit’ Green made me think of one of my favorite scenes in Monty Python and the Holy Grail.
UFO landings are among my favorite types of close encounters. I used to think they were a thing of the past, but thanks to FS6 I learned they are still being reported!
Dr. Eric Davis, another old Bigelow associate. Despite my misgivings about him I gotta admit that quote of his is an absolute banger. Of course, the real problem lies in proving it…
Jacques proposed to Flamine at the center of the labyrinth in Grace Cathedral.
Throughout my journals I love to use the figure of the little gray alien as a method to insert my own opinion. What can I say, they are super fun to draw :3
In the journal Jacques mentions meeting “Richard Dell, founder of Dell Computers” (in reality it is Michael Dell) who told him about an encounter with two blue orbs which was very positive in his life. He called the orbs “The Patrons” and he said they communicated with him. So it goes to show not all encounters with blue orbs are necessarily negative or harmful.
Vallée commits into his journals many notable world events, like the death of dictator Muammar Kadhafi. His death was gruesome, but the world is better off without him.
One of my favorite UFO cases comes from Keel’s Operation Trojan Horse, when the Ufonaut asks the witness “What is your Timeline?” Such a bizarre thing to say, but then again, bizarre is the true nature of this phenomenon.
The thing about my journal sketches is that they capture my impressions at the moment I’m reading. I don’t wait around until I read more and learn more details which leads to more visceral responses. And sometimes, I do feel the need to insert additional texts so the hypothetical reader of my journals (I always write posthumously, so to speak) will have a better understanding of my ramblings. In the case of this entry, I originally thought BAASS had managed to obtain actual DNA from a cryptid (either at the ranch or elsewhere) but later I realized Vallée and his associates were following the progress of Dr. Melba Ketchum, who jumped into the spotlight in the early 2010s with her claims that she had obtained and analyzed Bigfoot DNA. Her claims and published papers have now been largely dismissed by serious cryptozoologists (not to mention the scientific establishment in general).
My motto is: Anytime I get a chance to mock Bob Lazar as a ‘UFO whistleblower’ I will do so. Interestingly enough, Lazar is barely mentioned in FS6, having been disregarded by Jacques years before.
Vallée mentions an incident that occurred to Bigelow Aerospace (when they tried to launch one of their inflatable space modules from Russia) that was so absurd, it deserved to be immortalized in cartoon form.
One of the things that surprised me the most about FS6 was the importance given to Nick Redfern’s book Final Events, and the story of the Collins Elite, a shadowy government thinktank which apparently had studied the UFO problem decades before BAASS, and arrived to the conclusion it was all the result of demonic deception. As absurd as this may seem to those who want to understand UFOs as metal spacecraft from other planets, there seems to be quite a lot of people in high positions in government who hold this belief, which may answer a lot of questions re. their motives for maintaining the coverup for so long.
Seeing the United States rapidly declining into a Christian theocracy, it’s hard not to put on my old tinfoil hat for a minute and wonder: Is Project 2025 in some way related to the plans of the Collins Elite, who thought a theocracy was the only solution to a demonic infestation of our reality?
Demonic or not, the UFO mystery does have a dark side, and we dismiss it at our own peril. Col. Hollanda Lima, who was commissioned to study the UFO cases in Brazil in the 1970s, ended up killing himself; but not before talking to ufologists and revealing to them he was (supposedly) in contact with non human intelligences as a result of Operation Prato (part of the so-called Hitchhiker effect?).
“Nobody wants to do the hard work” is the very definition of the UFO field since the 1980s, I might add. Since the release of the MJ-12, researchers have opted to sit and wait until Poppa Government deigns to reveal all it knows to the rest of humanity. What’s the use of going to the field anymore, ufologists might justify themselves, if the secrets of the universe are probably gathering dust in some file cabinet somewhere? Same goes to those who think ‘Disclosure’ would immediately translate into anti-gravity technology and free energy being shared with the masses—it’s basically the tinfoil version of the Rapture.
Learning about UFO incidents involving military aircraft, it kinda makes me mad to remember that all the recent hoopla was ignited via some of the lamest, less interesting UFO events of the last few decades. Imagine if we had footage taken from one of those RC-135s flying over the Mediterranean in the 80s instead!
I’ve never read anything written by Burroughs, despite the fact some of my friends totally idolize him. Despite his flaws as a person, he certainly is a very quotable author.

That’s it for now. Like I said, there’s still plenty more where all that came from. I hope you’re enjoying these artistic meanderings of mine, and that you’re also considering grabbing a copy of Forbidden Science, Vol. 6.

We’ll pick it up in a few days. Thanks for reading! 😎

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