#1574 - Jacques Vallée & James Fox

**Jacques Vallée** (0:04)
The Joe Rogan Experience.

**Joe Rogan** (0:14)
Gentlemen, James, Jacques, welcome, thanks for being here. We'll explain what this is all about, because on the new Spotify podcast, we don't really have an intro the same way the old ones did.
James, you produced a phenomenal documentary on The Phenomenon, on what's going on with UFOs, and I just sent you an article that my friend Sager sent me today about a photograph, a very clear photograph that they've taken of this triangular UFO. So there's something that we'll be talking about in a little bit, Jacques Vallée, you have been studying this most of your life.

**Jacques Vallée** (0:53)
Too long.

**Joe Rogan** (0:54)
Too long.
We discussed it last night at dinner, that your interest in this came from an experience that you actually had as a child. You actually saw a UFO.

**Jacques Vallée** (1:05)
As a teenager with two other witnesses, one of the witnesses was half a mile away with binoculars. So I'm pretty sure that that object was real, and it was a classic disc, middle of the afternoon, clear sky, absolutely clear.
At the time, I became convinced that it might be a prototype of something that would be coming out later, and we're here many years later, and we still don't have anything like that. It was just hovering, and it was there.

**Joe Rogan** (1:41)
And you've been studying this for so long, and this was something you guys talked about in the film, that you were actually the character that the French UFO researcher in Close Encounters of the First Kind, or the Third Kind rather, was modeled after. The Steven Spielberg film.

**Jacques Vallée** (1:56)
Spielberg was intrigued with the idea of a character that was not quite as weird as, you know, the E.T.'s, but was a lot weirder than, you know, the people on the ground in the US trying to make sense of this and the military and so on. So he needed this intermediate character.
He thought, you know, a Frenchman was the right thing to do.

**Joe Rogan** (2:20)
And so did you talk to him about the film? Did you talk to him about when he was putting it together?

**Jacques Vallée** (2:25)
Yeah, journalists put us together about halfway through the final shooting of the film. And there were gaps in the movie at that point. So we had lunch twice together, and it was a lot of fun. At the time, he was looking for a transition between the time when they know the big thing is coming, the mothership is coming, and they don't know where.
And the mothership is sending signals, but they can't decipher the signals. And he had spent the morning at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and he said he couldn't make any sense of all the mathematics they had.
And I said, well, maybe you could have two screens that give you an angle, and the angle tells you where the thing is. And he said, no, that's too complicated, and it takes too long. It's got to be just a few minutes in the film. And then I thought of a photograph that was on the desk of Dr. Hynek, Dr. JR. Hynek, who was the Air Force consultant on UFOs at the time, and I was working with him, building databases and so on.
And on that photograph, there were three guys, you know, really well dressed on ladders around a huge sphere of the Earth in the lobby of some building somewhere with pieces of string that they were putting the string over the Earth.
And I told Dr. Hynek, I said, Alan, you know, what's the story behind this? And he said, well, when the first Sputnik was launched, you know, October 57, nobody had a computer program to compute an orbit. But they knew where the Sputnik had been seen. Nobody expected the Russians to come up with this, and they needed to know where it was going next. So the New York Times called the director of Harvard Observatory saying, can you give us a comment on the Russian satellite? And the guy said, hey, it's 3 o'clock in the morning, you know, what Russian satellite? And so they got dressed in a hurry, and they were trying to compute the orbit by putting a string around the model of the Earth in the lobby of Harvard. And I thought it was so funny. And Spielberg said, that's it, you know? That's it. The general says, come on, you know, the geographer who is the interpreter of the French guy says, well, it looks like it's somewhere in Wyoming, but where in Wyoming, where should we go?