Are we any closer to resolving the UFO mystery than we were in the 1970s? Perhaps the most famous of all researchers of the phenomenon, Jacques Vallee, says that the current situation – with UFO sightings regularly in the news and a high profile government investigation – very much reminds him of a similar scenario five decades ago.
In discussing his seminal 1979 book Messengers of Deception: UFO contacts and Cults (recently released for the first time in Kindle ebook format) with the Daily Grail – full video interview embedded below – Vallee said that watching the recent government hearings “reminds me absolutely of what it was like 50 years ago”.
Watching the panels before Congress [back then], Dr Hynek testified, Carl Sagan testified, Dr McDonald testified and the questions were exactly the same: “What do you think it is, how can we distinguish from balloons?” and then skeptics would come up and say “no no no, we can we can explain all of that with shooting stars” and so on, and we’re going through the same thing now.
When asked whether his opinion of what intelligence agencies knew about the phenomenon had changed from what he speculated in Messengers of Deception (that the real secret kept by the intelligence community about UFOs is that they were only pretending to know everything about them, but in reality they knew nothing), Vallee instead stated that his opinion had only been reinforced “by Congress of all people.” He noted that they’ve confirmed “that we know now that there is a real mystery, [and] we’ve heard the director of the CIA saying that this was not explained by any of the systems that they monitored.”
There is a mystery, we can now state that, but we still don’t know where it belongs. Does it belong to atmospheric physics in some way, is it a cosmic phenomenon of some sort? They’ve pretty much excluded and said on the record these are not Chinese and these are not Russian.
Ultimately though, Vallee says, while “we’ve made some progress…in terms of research, we have not learned anything new about the identity or about the characteristics” of UFOs in that time.
During the interview Vallee also discussed a wide variety of other topics related to his research over the years, including synchronicities, his warning about the Heaven’s Gate cult almost two decades before their mass suicide, the Belgian UFO wave of the 90s, the UMMO affair and much more.
