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Forbidden Sketches: Hand-Drawn Artwork Inspired by the Published Journals of Jacques Vallée (Vol. 6/Part 2)

By red pill junkieon

Greetings, Coppertops! We resume our ‘sketchified’ review of Jacques Vallée’s Forbidden Science, Vol. 6 (Scattered Castles).

The subtitle, BTW, was taken from the randomly generated codename he received when he finally got his security clearances back when the BAASS project was running. I think he found it amusing, since it serendipitously conveys the notion of all this hidden knowledge on the UFO mystery kept by the power that be, without any oversight or anyone to connect the dots on it; like caches of treasure buried under the Pentagon, but no one knows where to find them because all the maps were deliberately burned down.

Anyway, enjoy! Oh, and once again, these images are meant to reflect on my own personal opinion and no one else’s.

As I said before, the wonderful thing about Jacques’s memoirs is that they show how prescient he was about technological developments whose impact we are now widely aware of in retrospect. Like the risk of social networks as tools for technological surveillance and mass manipulation, something even the so-called ‘experts’ couldn’t grasp just over a decade ago.
And it wouldn’t be too long until Jacques’s concerns about digital surveillance would be vindicated when the Snowden scandal broke…
Speaking about people with prescience, it really feels like we’re all living inside one of Philip K’s novels doesn’t it?
The ability behind Vallée’s technological prescience lies not in a paranormal communication with some AI super intelligence from the future, but from the circumstances in his life that allowed him a unique vantage point to witness the development of key technological advances, which at the time few people were able to even comprehend.
Other technological developments Jacques has always kept track of, are our collective progress in space exploration. Having a couple of robots roaming around the surface of Mars may seem normal to kinds who were born after the 2010’s, but Jacques was among the first to actually map the surface of the Red Planet using punch-card computers! That really puts things in perspective.
As I explained in my previous post, I was initially confused about the entries in which Vallée mentions ‘cryptid DNA samples’ because I mistakenly thought it was part of the BAASS project. Later I realized they were just following on the work of Dr. Melba Ketchum, which was something of a nothingburger because it contained a lot of errors and false assumptions, which is why it was never published in a proper peer reviewed journal (she eventually ended up acquiring a second-rating science publication just so she could publish her findings).
In Vol. 5 and 6 of the journals, the negative aspects of the UFO phenomenon really took a special emphasis in the work of BAASS. But perhaps that was a result of the sample of cases they chose to investigate (if you work for the Department of Defense, of course you’re going to initially assume UFOs are a threat).
Because of all this negative stuff they were finding, the general sense of Vallée’s associates (after BAASS ended they went and continued working together as a private group called the LoneStars) was one of doom and gloom. One joked saying they felt like the sailor at the crow’s nest of the Titanic trying to alert the crew about the iceberg.
But Jacques also took the time to visit sites in which paranormal phenomena are accepted and regarded as a part of Nature, like Saint-Geniez (France).
Jacques has lived a very long and fruitful life, and as such it is only natural the last two volumes of his memoirs record the passing of many friends and colleagues; such as Ingo Swann, the father of the Remote Viewing modern methodology.
Another dear friend Jacques said good-bye too in Vol. 6: Morning Glory Ravenhart. She and her husband Oberon were the longtime pagan friends of Jacques and Janine from back when they kept a property Spring Hills, California. They used to organize annual medieval type feasts in honor of Saint Agobard.
As Jacques says good-bye to some friends and loved ones in his journey, he also manages to meet new kindred spirits. One of them is Jack Katz, a legendary comic book artist who became a very close friend and confidant. Katz has had many strange paranormal experiences which seemed to have triggered and directed his creative streak.
Volume 6 was certainly not the first one in which Dr. Steven Greer was mentioned, but this was nonetheless the first time I decided to draw the famous Disclosure activist. Here he is, proudly posing with poor little Ata.
It was because of Greer that Dr. Garry Nolan irrupted into the UFO scene when he decided to analyze Ata, and concluded (at the time) that it was human and showed signs of maturity. This got him into Jacques’s radar, who decided to give him a call and invite him for breakfast. The rest, as they say, is history.
…And of course, when Nolan retracted his position and finally concluded Ata was nothing more than a discarded human foetus, well… let’s just say Dr. Greer didn’t take it too kindly.
Thanks to Nolan, Vallée was able to take the analysis of UFO samples to levels beyond of what Dr. Peter Sturrock, the pioneer in the field, was able to achieve. As you already know I don’t ascribe to the ETH, but if they actually manage to build a freaking spaceship one day out of those materials, I do hope it gets named after Sturrock.
UFO buffs may think reports of strange creatures are exclusive to the Southwest of the United States or South America, but the reality of it is this is just a matter of cultural perception, perhaps because people in some areas are less inclined to reveal their strange experiences. To wit, Vallée investigated cases of strange creatures in his natal France, which are as bizarre as those coming from the Skinwalker ranch in Utah (PS considering I drew this without reference of a previous pencil linework I really like how this sketch turned out).
As you go through the pages of Vol 6 you can perceive the growing frustration Vallée felt with the rest of the BAASS project. It seems neither they now their secretive sponsors really understood the importance of the kind of database analysis he brought to the table, while they were fruitlessly waiting to get special access to the ‘hardware’ (which was never really granted in the end). Eventually, Vallée decided to split from the group (although they would eventually form a new private working group once the AAWSAP government contract didn’t get renewed)
Perhaps the main difference between Vallée and the rest of the BAASS group, is that while they all viewed the UFO phenomenon from the POV of relativistic physics or quantum mechanics, he views it from the POV of Cybernetics and Information theory —less Star Trek and more The Matrix.
Cultural perception is important, too. Disclosure activists love to gab about how ‘disruptive’ the truth about UFOs is going to be for the rest of the world (‘ontological shock’ is their favorite buzzword now) but an event by his friend Claudine Brelet in which she observed a display of anomalous lights in the sky while she was working in Africa—she was totally amazed, while the African military officers accompanying her were totally unfazed—goes to show developed countries are probably going to have a harder time adjusting to a new UFO paradigm; whereas cultures which still have a tradition of coexisting with spirits and other supernatural forces will experience little problem making the transition.
Vallée’s studies led him to discover the work and philosophy of the Russian Cosmists, and how their spiritual beliefs had a great influence in the development of the Soviet space program. Perhaps in the 1950´s, Tsiokowsky (the father of Soviet space science) would have been considered a ‘Contactee’.
As his colleagues’ view keeps veering toward the negative, Vallée’s entries read like he was the only dissenting voice. A heretic among heretics.
The funny thing about the LoneStars’ negative views on the UFO phenomenon, is that they sound completely unoriginal to me. In fact, many of them sound as if they were literally taken out of John Keel’s books!
…Speaking of Keel, this sketch (which was one of the better ones I drew on this journal) was inspired by a very creepy MIB encounter Vallée mentions on page 218, which seems to be indirectly connected to the death of Dr. René Hardy, a UFO researcher in France. Are we to assume these encounters are solely the result of some government group’s oversight of UFO events and those who investigate them, or is there something more going on?
The Forbidden Science Journals are peppered with delightful glimpses that allow you to get a sense of Jacques as a person, besides his many roles as scientist, entrepreneur and UFO investigator. For instance, did you know he’s a fan of the 49ers and Carlos Santana? I sure didn’t!
In a book by Manly P. Hall that belonged to his mentor, J. Allen Hynek, Vallée found the above quote, and next to it an inscription left by Allen. Needless to say, I completely agree, but I would also add that there are many ‘paths with heart’ worth pursuing in this life.
Thomas Lake Harris, who gets briefly mentioned in Vol. 6, and immediately reminded me of the villain in one of my favorite videogames.
Of all the alternative theories to the UFO phenomenon, the one I find less interesting is the ‘time travelers from the future’ one, championed by people like Michael Masters. Perhaps the reason for it is because they are too bland for my palate, and if I were to entertain a future timeline component to my UFO meanderings, they would look a lot more like Seth Speaks and a lot less like The Terminator.
On page 239, Vallée writes: “The labyrinth at Grace Cathedral represents a spiritual journey to the soul and a model of the eternal quest. When one gets closer to the center, the illusion suddenly gets broken by long excursions, only to return when least expected, with new insights. I love its well-crafted path of disappointment, patience and reward, back again to the external world. “Visita Interiora Terrae,” the Rosicrucians way.”
The figure of the Trickster has a more predominant role in Vallée’s thinking than many would assume.
Jim Semivan. Of all the people who would get to conform the To the Stars Academy of Arts and Science (TTSA), Semivan was the first one Vallée was in contact with—aside from Puthoff, that is. Vol. 6 gives a good insight behind Semivan’s reasons to pursue the UFO question—and the procedures the gatekeepers use to keep outsiders in the dark…

That’s it for now. We’ve already covered about half of the book, so in the next installment we’ll get to see more about the beginnings of TTSA, and Vallée’s meetings with a certain punk rocker…

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