#2288 - Jacques Vallée

**Joe Rogan** (0:01)
Joe Rogan Podcast, checking out The Joe Rogan Experience.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:06)
Showing by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day.

**Joe Rogan** (0:12)
We're up, sir. Very good to see you.

**Jacques Vallée** (0:14)
Good to see you.

**Joe Rogan** (0:16)
I really enjoyed our conversation last night. We all went out to dinner, and Hal Puthoff blew my mind.

**Jacques Vallée** (0:23)
As you know, I've known him for a long time.

**Joe Rogan** (0:26)
Yeah, when did you meet him? What year?

**Jacques Vallée** (0:28)
I knew him at SRI, actually. I was at Stanford Research Institute before him, in one of the very early Internet research teams. When there was no Internet, it was called the ARPANET. It was the network of the Advanced Research Project Agency, and it was all, you know, computer experiment and so on. And I turned into, we had engine number three on the Internet at SRI in California.

**Joe Rogan** (1:00)
Engine number three on the ARPANET.

**Jacques Vallée** (1:02)
By the time I joined them, there were like 30 machines already. So, and it was exciting. And then, you know, Dr. Pudoff and Russell Tarr came in with a proposal to SRI to do a parapsychology research at SRI, which had never been done. And it was funny because the, so I was already there, you know, in a team.

**Joe Rogan** (1:30)
What year was this? What year?

**Jacques Vallée** (1:34)
Oh, God.
Seventy-four. Wow. So the arpiment was around 74 Yeah. And it was funny because I was in my office and the vice president of SRI came in, closed the door and said, Jacques, you know, you've published some things that are controversial under your name on UFOs.
And you haven't lost your scientific reputation, which is why you're here working for us at SRI on the ARPANET. But, you know, there's a proposal from Dr. Pudoff and Dr. Tarrac to do parapsychology research here. And we've never done that. And I said, well, you know, it's a very valid, I think it's a very valid area of research. We should, you know, we're the kind of institution that should do that. He said, well, let me draw something on your whiteboard. And he drew a scale, a horizontal scale. And on one side, there was a little square. He said, this is the most we can expect in terms of funding for research in parapsychology. You know, it's maybe at most a million a year, okay? And here is what I manage, you know, in this division. He drew a huge cube, you know, it said 150 million dollars. Should we jeopardize the research we do for Xerox and IBM and AT&T and the Bank of America and so on, just to do some research on, you know, psychic things? And I said, well, you know, the reason we get all this money from DOD and Bank of America and so on, is that we do the research that they can't do themselves. We do. We do the, you know, we go out and we take risk. And I think we should take the same risk with Hal Pudoff and Russell Tarak, because this could be very big. You know, there is a lot of literature on this already, and we can bring the science into it. And they can bring the science into it, you know. And he said, well, there is a meeting of the board of directors of SRI, you know, in two days. And most of them are against it. What do I tell them? And I said, well, I can, you know, I can write up the reasons why, in science, you have to take chances. And this is science. I mean, this isn't just engineering. And he said, well, give me a memo by tomorrow at 12 So I went home, and I wrote a two-page memo, which was confidential. I don't think anybody has seen it for the board, explaining why there was scientific evidence, you know, enough of it so that good research could be done. And I, you know, obviously that may have helped in getting the approval for them to come in. And then after the first year, you know, all they were there because the money kept coming and the results, good scientific results came out of it.

**Joe Rogan** (5:28)
So when you say parapsychology, specifically, what were you attempting to study?

**Jacques Vallée** (5:33)
So most of parapsychology, as the name indicates, has been studied by psychologists, you know, people who have experiences and they relate their experiences and they have strange dreams, they have all that.
And then that has been structured by people doing experiments, for example, you know, trying to move objects with your mind, trying to, of course, send messages psychically to other people or guessing what's written in a closed envelope and so on, that kind of thing. And, but again, those were done by good experimentalists, but it wasn't, where is the physics of it? I mean, you know, because in physics, you know, those things are not supposed to happen.