Speaker 1: Are UFOs new that Pentagon wants you to think so. However,
scientists like doctor Jacques Vallet have studied this for decades.
Doctor Valet joins us to discuss his latest book, Forbidden Science,
six Scattered Castles, the NIDS, Bigelow, UFO government database, Close
Encounters of the Third Kind, and whether he is part
of Steven Spielberg's upcoming UFO movie, Let's get to It.
Hey everyone, I'm Matt Ford and welcome to the Good
Trouble Show. On November sixteenth, nineteen seventy seven, Steven Spielberg's
movie Close Encounters of the Third Kind hit the silver
screen across America, bringing the UFO topic to the masses
like never before. Now as a kid, this movie sparked
my imagination and interest in UFOs otherwise known as UAP.
One of my favorite characters in the film was Claude Lacombe,
a French scientists who led the government's effort to contact
the extraterrestrial visitors. Now, in late March, we were joined
by the real French scientist who inspired that character, doctor
Jacques Valet. But first, please hit the subscribe and thumbs
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Speaker 2: Okay.
Speaker 1: Today's guest is not only one of the most influential
figures in studying unexplained from but also an astrophysicist, computer scientist,
and venture capitalist. If that's not enough, he helped map
Mars for NASA and was part of the Internet's early development.
Here with his new book Forbidden Science Six Scattered Castles.
Please welcome doctor Jacques Valet Jacques, how are you, sir?
Speaker 2: You excellent?
Speaker 1: Well, welcome to the show. It is an honor to
have you here, all right, So let's let's jump into
your latest book, Forbidden Science, Scattered Castle. So this is
the sixth in the Forbidden Science series. What, Jacques, what
motivated you to write the book series in this kind
of diary style format?
Speaker 2: Then, I, you know, reading diaries is a special only
special people read diaries and biographies. Biographies are easier to
read because they have a beginning, a middle, and an end.
Diaries don't. So there, you know, on page twenty five
you may have a particular idea and then on page
fifty one you go on to another idea. So it's
disconcerting to the readers. And I've had that criticism. Well,
you know, your ideas change as you get older and
you exposed to both more things, more people, and so
I started going through prices, you know, at the end
of adolescence, I guess when I was going to be
a student and then a graduate student at University of
Paris so on, and there were many things happening in France.
My father had died, and I felt a need to
recenter myself and sort of look at do an inventory
of the things I knew and try to define where
I was going and making notes of all the things
that were happening. There was a war in Algeria, as
you remember, France was in deep political uproar and all
those things. And as a student that was fascinating, but
it was also very scary. So I think I started
writing it to center myself. And then I found that
it was a great way to sort of as a scientist,
to calibrate myself, to see, who knows, why am I
thinking this at this particular time when some of my
friends don't. I mean, I think something else. Who's right?
How would I find out? And so I kept doing it,
And then in volume two, when I was when I
came to the United States, then I found that it
was an invaluable tool to recall all the things that
I had to learn, and of course I took to
learn English. So I started writing writing it in English,
and then I never I never stopped because it was
a reference for me and my wife and my family
and something I could go back to to understand because
by then I was working with doctor Heinek and I
was doing my PhD at Northwestern in Artificial intelligence nineteen
sixty seven. Artificial intelligence has a long long tail. I
talk about going back fifty years to learn about the
next ten years. Okay, well, that's always what I've done,
including as a now as a as a venture investor,
you know, looking at the past to understand what a
new company is doing. So all of that goes into
the into the journal. It's not for a mass market.
It's for people who enjoy the journey and want to
have a perspective on things now maybe more, you know,
if if the Good Lord gives me the ability to
continue writing.
Speaker 1: I certainly hope so. I think one of the things
that I've really enjoyed about reading these books is, you
know a lot of times when when you're read reading
books you know strictly about like the research or or whatnot,
and and those books they don't really give you an
insight into the human being. You know, so who is
Jacques Valet? And so much of what I read, especially
what you wrote about your wife and and just your
personal experiences outside of outside of the UAP topic, I
just I found it was really I just absolutely love it.
I found it touching, and I wish more people would
would follow that that same same writing format. I want
to switch to your your research, and it's it's something
that a question I've always had sort of like how
do you reconcile it? But how do you approach your
scientific research regarding witness testimony? Because you'll you'll hear critics
say or these debunkers that will say that that witness
testimony does not constitute any sort of evidence. How do
you how do you figure that into your research work.
Speaker 2: That's a question for any scientists who leaves the laboratory
and goes out into the world. You know, it's a
also a question for physicians. You know, physicians are don't
don't have a perfect human model. They they take whoever
comes through the dog, you know, with whatever ailment they have,
and you stop from there. So I felt that they
I had seen a UFO myself. I think they I
never tried to hide it. I was very clear about that.
And by the way, I mean, it's never harmed me
really in my scientific career because, for one thing, many
people have private observations of their own. So when you're
very clear about who you are and what you've seen,
that engages an interesting conversation. Sometimes it may not be published,
but it's it's interesting. Also, people judge me by what
I actually did and produced in my work, and not
by the fact that you know, as a teenager it's seen,
it's seen something. In France. What I saw was very
clear because the uh, this was in the middle of
a beautiful summer afternoon. Uh I. My mother saw it
first and called me. I came down from inside the
house and joined her in the yard. The thing was
very not moving. It was clearly over church he hoped was,
which is a small town about an hour out from Paris.
And the object was very clear. It was about half
a mile away. It was like if you took the spoon,
and it was silver spoon sideways with a little dough
on top, and it was above a church that was
half a mile away. We saw that. And then the
next day I spoke to a friend of mine from
school who told me that he had seen the same thing,
and in fact, he had looked at it with binoculous
His house was another half mile up the hill from
where we were. So you have three witnesses, the middle
of the afternoon, very clear day, no clouds in the sky.
Speaker 3: Uh.
Speaker 2: One of them, you know, looking at it with binoculars.
And I got him to draw it, and he drew
the same thing I had seen. So I told my
father My father was a judge, was a president of
the tribunal in that area, and you know, the family
of the judge doesn't go around looking at flying saucers.
So we never published it at the time. And he,
you know, he was a man with and as you
may know, judges in instruction, judges in France do the investigation,
you know, with the gendarmes or the police, but they
run the investigation. The police doesn't, okay. So he was
very experienced with those, very experienced with war, and he
was very experienced with with the area and with people
and so on. He had done a number of field
investigations around the town. So he didn't question the fact
that we had seen this and that it was unusual.
But he said, look, there are new aircraft coming up,
you know, the jets and so on, the mete oars,
if you remember the mediors, well some of the first
you know, jet fighters and so on, and he said,
there are new new technology and in the next couple
of years were probably this would become a common knowledge.
Well it didn't. And I started cataloging the cases that
I had access to, including the early fives of the
French Air Force in the late forties and early fifties
that were there before the current you know, committees that
are in place now with the Space Agency in fi US.
So that's how I got in. I got into it,
and the the subject became more and more interesting. As
you may know, I was married for a long time
with a woman who was a child psychologist. Many of
the witnesses were children, so and and children don't don't lie,
or if they lie, they lie in you know, as
a as a joke or as in a particular way.
She was a student of Caget in Switzerland and Paris,
and had had been a school teacher, so had long
experience with kids. And very often when we were looking
into a case, you know, the whole family had seen
the thing, so she would take the she would go
into the kitchen and talk to the wife and the
kids when I was talking to the pontificating men, you know,
adults who were speculating about what they had seen. So
the kids are wonderful, and I learned to listen to
kids carefully and try to put the different pieces of
an observation together. And that has helped me a lot,
you know, throughout my life.
Speaker 1: I'm curious, you're talking about how you saw what you
saw when I'm sorry, what age were you eight or nine?
Speaker 2: I think I was fourteen or fifteen, and that was
in pourtoise.
Speaker 1: How much do you think They let me back up
a bit so I have not seen any or I
had not seen anything uap wise, literally my entire life
until I began communicating with Robert Hastings. I decided I
was going to do some writing about it, and it
also communicated with the national security staff of a United
States senator and literally about I think it was just
a few days later, started having some paranormal stuff happen
in the home. And then a few days later I
was outside at night and a orb appeared above above
the home, and I posed this question to, you know,
to Chris Mellen, because I asked myself, It's like, well,
if my entire adult life, I'd never had anything happen,
and then all of a sudden, I'm actively mentally engaging
with a phenomenon, thinking about it and whatnot, and then
poof it appears. And I've had this orb appeer probably
around ten times so far. The sort of poltergeist activity
only lasted for around four to six months. But do
you think that mentally engaging with the phenomenon causes it
to react.
Speaker 2: Well, you know, that's possible hypothesis. I would be the
counter example, because I've never seen anything else since what
I saw as a teenager. My wife did, and it
took me a long time to really get recincided with that.
Speaker 4: We I built a little observatory on my own up
in the forest in the Redwood Forest north of San Francisco,
and we had that property where we went mostly on
weekends and holidays with the kids for over fifteen years.
Speaker 2: And that would have been an ideal place for something
to happen because the nearest neighbors were half a mile
away and there was this observatory with a dorm on
top in the middle of the redwood forest. So that's
something that it was a discontinuity in the landscape, and
it should have attracted the attention of somebody. It didn't,
or at least I wasn't aware of it, except for
the bear who were coming well big around, you know,
looking for garbage, so that which was the only intruders.
The one night we were sleeping in that little observatory
there was one bedroom, and my wife woke up and
saw two little lights like, you know, like those those
little globes that people described, you know, quite small, moving around.
There were books on around the walls at their ears,
as you can tell, I love books, and it was
just going around, and by the time she woke me up,
it was it was gone, so I did not see it.
And then we eventually our kids grew up, and we
sold the ranch, moved back to the city. But the
last night she was still there finishing, you know, wrapping
up things that we had sold the place to our
neighbors who were a winery that wanted to expand, and
so this was all very you know, very friendly, and
she was ready to leave the last night. There are
no curtains on the windows anymore. There's a big.
Speaker 3: Light, big bright, white blue virtual violet light moving down
the path in front of the house, slowly illuminating the forest,
illuminating everything.
Speaker 2: She gets up, goes to see it, and the thing
follows the the driveway all the way to the to
the road that goes goes back to the town. Ah,
you know, as if to say goodbye. And this was
exactly what I was hoping to catch. Although you know,
this was at ground level. I don't know why it
used the road. Sure, it's only was not a car.
It was sort of the symbol of you know, leaving.
And that's of course the wond she took in the
morning too, as we left the property. Things like that.
They they seemed to engage definitely at that They engage
at their own level, in their own template, their own
vocabulary of events, and that can be very very disconcerting.
And uh, you know, I'm a little angry that I
wasn't there at the time she wal to see it.
H And No, I have had no other range expenses
of that type. I've suddenly studied psychology, you know, had
as you know, experiments with peopleank Ino Swan and Uri
Geller and so, but they had nothing to do with
this subject.
Speaker 1: Okay, let's talk about In your book, you discussed the
database you created for NIDS and Robert Bigelow.
Speaker 4: I have.
Speaker 2: Much of my work in our computer science now Pristal
Observatory had the task to maintain the catalog of right stars.
You know, there are about ten thousand right styles that
you can see visually, and ten thousand is not a
big number, but every star we know a lot of
things about that style, so it gets to be an interesting,
an interesting five. And I was maintaining it at the
University of Texas. First, working with Geraldo Vocula, I had
recompiled the Catalog of Galaxies observatory had the task to
maintain the catalog of right stars. You know, there are
about ten thousand right stars that you can see visually,
and ten thousand is not a big number, but every
star we know a lot of things about that style,
so it gets to be an interesting, an interesting five.
And I was maintaining it at the University of Texas. First,
working with Geraldo Vucula, I had recompiled the catalog of
galaxies that we were maintaining, which was the first complete
you know at the time catalog of galactic spectra and
galactic astrophysics, and the team had been working on that
and it was my job to reform at it so
they could be published. So I had that background with large,
large catalogs in astronomy, in austrophysics, and then I did
the same thing for UFOs, and I started corresponding and
in part inspiring others to do the same thing. So
when not only at NEEDS but later at BASS, which
was classified, I was in charge of the computer project,
and almost half of the budget went into deploying a
team that could translate. We had four translators in the team,
you know, Russian, Spanish, Portuguese and French retranslating the other
fives we had. I built really a series of databases,
which should people call it a data warehouse where because
you can you cannot have the same structure for a
database from pilots and a database from farmers because they
measure different things with different instruments or different visual impressions.
So we we did all that and to my knowledge
it's still classified. There. They have been a couple of
couple of books that have mentioned the structure that I
put together, you know, to begin this. The project was
stopped after only two years, so we got the chance
to introduce the what I had designed already, which was
the AI you know, the validation of the data and
then the AI processing of the data. We thought we
had five years and the project was killed after only
two years. So I cannot go into into that, but
the that would be the way to one way two
ascertain the validity of theories about the UFO phenomenon in
connection with the visual sightings that we have and the
sightings from pilots and every all the recordings that we have.
Now we don't have the database. So and the to me,
the thing that's emotional about this is that we let
the whole team go. You know, a team that was
that had been very carefully assembled by doctor kell Her
and by mister Biggerol was a great team. Uh you know,
about thirty people who worked on that, on that database,
including reinvestigating certain cases and from so on, and then
doing all the translations. That's that's a treasure. And it's
just so the treasure was in the heads of people
because what what people don't seem to understand is that
in a novel area like this, you can you can
hire you know, a PhD In astru physics from Harvard
and uh, you know, an expert in uh the medieval records,
you know, from from Columbia, and you put them on
your team to study this problem. They will be useless
for two years. You know. They have to absorb the
history of how the research has been done, where the
records come from, how they've been calibrated, what were the
records that they don't have that they should go out
and look for. Maybe given their their skill, but they
have a skill that they've required in another area, you know,
as as I did with computer programming and astrophysics. But
that doesn't make me expert in UFOs. You know. Then
you have to apply what you've known to that material,
and you have to do it as a team. Where
we had the team, you know, and mister Biggelow build
the team for you know, for the government in a
classified project. All of us had top secret clearances, and
you know, we were talking about the physics doctor put
off Dr Green for the medical side and so on,
and all that has been dissipated for reasons. I'm known
in Washington somewhere, somebody just you know, essentially took the
money and did something else with it. So that I'm
not getting into another government project of any kind, you know,
I'm going to concentrate on what I know, what I
can do with myself. Now, it turns out that with
the progress that has been made in computer science just
in the last five years, I can do a lot
of things with just a few friends and a couple
of modern computers. So That's what I'm going to do.
Speaker 1: Now, do you know, have you heard for instance, if
if Arrow like doctor Sean Kirkpatrick did. Did they ever
request access to this database? Are you aware of any
request of that nature?
Speaker 2: The request by whom.
Speaker 1: By Arrow, you know, a Pentagon's era All Domain and
Holy Resolution Office or any other organization.
Speaker 2: I do not know the answer to that, and if
I did, I probably couldn't. He couldn't talk about it. Sure.
The only thing I did is at the time of
the hearings, I was asked to go back to Washington
and uh uh recalled, you know, the go over those
those times with someone from the from the Intelligence Committee
of the Senate. UH. And I did that, went into
a skiff with him where I could talk about at
the level of of the clearance and tell him about
but what had happened and what had happened to the
database that at this point that you know, when you
come right down to it, people are impressed with the numbers.
We have over two hundred and thirty thousand cases filtered
and rationalized in this large database to twelve databases. Yeah,
but it's at the end of the day, it's you know,
it's a bucket of bits. Sure, the intelligence was in
the heads of the people we trained at the beginning.
We gave a series of lectures doctor put Off, Doctor Green,
and I and of course doctor Keller trained that team
of investigators mostly and the translators to compile the database.
And they're gone. So the the we may still have
the information somewhere, but we don't have the intelligence. The
intelligence has been vapor lives. Now.
Speaker 1: In your book, you discuss, uh, you use the term
active measures, which I mean that really caught my eye.
What are active measures? And do you think that those
these measures measures? Excuse me, I can't talk. Do you
think these measures are still in effect today?
Speaker 2: Well? Active measures is you know, I certainly enriched my
vocabulary when I started working side by side with people
from the classified world. It's like scattered castles, you know.
The scattered castle castles is the database of classified projects
that you want to go to if if you have,
you know, a clearance, and you need to know about
some other projects that might correspond to the girls. There's
I don't know if a term comes from the CIA
or from the Russians. I believe it's a translation from
the Russian. It's the the art of It's an art.
It's not a scientific methodology. It's the art of taking
information that either is true or might be true, and
twisting it for a political or propaganda game and uh,
and then inserting it into the news and in a
way where it looks like it looks like nuts. It
just isn't true. Oh it is, but it's not false either.
It's almost it's partially true. So it's believable if somebody
does research on it, except that something has been twisted
to represent something else, and it's it's extremely powerful, it's
extremely deceptive. I think future historians are going to have
a very hard time looking at our news and reconstructing
what really happened. I mean, who who who did it?
We did the you know who had the knife? And
it's it's a game that we're playing with the Russians
mainly and also with the Chinese, of essentially poll udinge
everyday information in order to twist the data in a
particular way that's harmful to the other side. Now the
fact that UFOs of course can be used to do that,
you know, there are there are stories planting that well,
thanks to our close friendship with the Aliens, we've already
been on Mars, you know, and there are all kinds
of stories like that. One one way I can. And
this was explained to me. I mean, they set me
down and there said Jack, you need to learn about
a few things. Suppose that you have you're building an
atom bomb. There you're at, you know, in New Mexico,
building an at on bomb. And you know that among
the thousand people who build, who work on the ball,
there must be spies, German spies, Russian spies, whatever. You
want to find the spies, but you can't because they
are very good. You could find them if you could
find the people they talk to when they send a
report to Moscow. So you're going to plant the story
in Moscow, not in New Mexico at the other end,
and you're going to work your way backwards into the
people who might have some communication with Moscow that could
be carrying information back and forth about the secret thing.
You're doing. What better way than seeding or rumor in
pravd inocuously about something of interest that's very specific and
then seeing if it pops up in New Mexico and
who knows about it in New Mexico, And then you
may have two ends of an interesting string. See what
I mean? Now, that's going to be to do that.
You're going to come up with the cock and bull story.
And it doesn't matter what it is. It could be
about soccer, it could be about the moon, it could
be about anything. It just has to catch the attention
of specific people at a specific time that I never
knew about that. I mean, it's not even in spy
novels that you can as it's just a technique. Now.
The problem to me, I mean, I don't care about
what they do with that. It's say a job. The
problem with me is that it pollutes my database, and
I yeah, I'm trying to keep it clean. Uh. In
my in one of my books, I mentioned some cases
from Russia where there was there was a man who
told the story in Russia that came came. As you know,
I went to Russia several times looking for information about
their space programs and actually invited there with journalists from
from France, and I've published what we found out because
they were open to talking about was at the time. Well,
there was a man who had been told by a
friend of yours who worked in a in the Russian
space program, that there were UFOs that they were seeing
and that if he came with him to the top
of the hill in the evening, they would he could
show him they were film. So they did that. They
got to this place in the evening, and he saw
he saw essentially a fan of light, of intense light
that was yellow and orange and red, and that that
sort of disk just went up in the sky and disappeared. Well,
I published that. That's an interesting thing that somebody told me.
And a skeptic actually from from Los Angeles who follows
a space program wrote to me and said he saw
the proton well kept taking off. They were miles and
miles from the launch.
Speaker 4: Bad uh.
Speaker 2: And of course the the it was a launch. It
was an illegal launch of the satellite that carried radioactive
radioactive stuff in violation of the agreement we had with
the Soviet Union at the top. And they they they
validated the agreement by carrying nuclear nuclear radioactive material in
there in in their satellites. And the he of course
couldn't see the rocket, but he could see the exhaust.
The exhaust was like, you know, like this this corne
of extraping bringer by going up in the sky. Uh.
And he was he was told it was a flying saucer.
Because then the story for people like me, the story
can get into the literaly shut and then the next
time people see a you know, light going up in
the sky, you know, all the Siberia, they're going to say, oh,
that's another flying saucer, and they won't think of any
illegal satellite. Note the stories like that, you know, I
was never talked about about that, about that that part
of the game, but it's sort of fascinating and to me, again,
I need to know about that because when it pollutes
the actual databases that we have, and I certainly don't
want to be fooled by that. The same thing about
all the crashes and so on, I learned to Yeah,
some of them are true and some of them they
may not may not be true.
Speaker 1: Sure, I want to ask you a question about, you know,
where this is, where all of this may be from.
So probably two three years ago I had a conversation
with a national security individual that worked in a senator's office,
and this person said it was about a thirty minute
conversation and at the end of it, this person said,
we may never know where this is from our entire
entire life if this did turn out to be extraterrestrial,
and that's solely where it's from would that disappoint you?
Speaker 2: And if so, why, well, yeah, it's shocking. But you know,
in any science you have that problem. You work on this,
but you work on something all your life, you become
a great professor, You teach your students and so on
about what you know today. Cannot reconcile it with gone
on mechanics. Really, there will be that branch of science
will die, probably both of them, and something else is
going to replace it. You know that, Okay? In the
same thing in medicine, I mean we if you talk
to medical researchers, they will admit that there are many
things that they've been researching. Well. For example, a very
simple example, uh, in in medicine is we don't know
what determines the time of birth of a baby. There
are now now there are you know, hypotheses about exactly
what triggers it. But you know, you may have a
woman with a baby and the baby is ready but
uh and should be born, but it isn't, and then
all of a sudden, you know, the birth process starts. Well,
what is it that determines it? Uh? An astrologer would say,
it's a conjunction of venus with Jupiter. You know that
that times it, but it's more likely that there is
an exchange of signals between the organism of the baby
would change, you know, ready and the mother I'm ready.
When you're ready, Well tell me when you're ready, and
I'm ready, and so on, and that can go on
for a long time. You have the same thing in electronics.
You know that, and then then there is a signal
that ends the exchange, and then the baby is born
very quickly. So we don't understand that process. I mean
it's a part of information exchange, very complex, very subtle
information exchange and the biology of the mother and the
biology of the baby. You have the same thing in austrophysics.
I mean I worked for Professor Stuac for two years.
We published a number of papers about the structure of
the Sun, the structure of the corona, and also about
you know, neutral styles and things like that. That's what
we were researching. Well, try to explain the corona of
the Sun. The corona is completely outside the Sun. The
sun surface is cold in astrophysics terms, and you know,
the inside of the Sun is at millions of degrees,
the surface is at ten thousand degrees. You know, which
is essentially, when you do the model of the Sun,
you assume that temperature of the surface is zero, because
ten thousand degrees of heat is essentially zero in terms
of astrophysics. So it's a good enough approximation, which amazed
at the beginning, and I started working with those models.
So the surface of the Sun is called the corona,
is at three million degrees And how did that happen?
I mean, the corona is a plasma that we see
only in the complete eclipse. You know what you see.
Of course, you don't see the Sun that you see
the corona. It's away from the Sun. Well, for a
long time that was that was I mean many astronomers
worked on this and died without knowing the answer. Yeah,
that's what you have to be to do in science.
You work on something, you push it a little bit,
and then something else happens.
Speaker 1: Finally, in your book, and this really really kind of
stopped me in my tracks, you speak about how disclosure
would and I don't know the exact quote in front
of me, but basically you were saying that how disclosure
could bring about the reality of NHI worldwide and that
and you're opening a door that could never be shut.
And you know, so that leads me to the question,
in all of your years of researching the phenomenon, do
you think disclosure is in the best interest of humanity
or is it best to leave that door shut.
Speaker 2: We could that disclosure could have happened at three times
really in history. It could have happened in the fifties,
once we knew that this was not the Russians and
this was not the Chinese, and it would have been
fascinating to people in the fifties or sixties, mid sixties,
because people knew that eventually we were going to go
in space. In fact, it would have been a great
argument from us, you know, to say, look, look, there
seems to be life out there. Let's go meet Okay.
It would not have been a big problem to manage
the impact on the public. That wasn't done because probably
because people thought there was technology there that we could
acquire and do something with which was which was ridiculous
because it was just so much so different from what
we can do. It should have happened again in the
fifties mid fifties, at the time of the Battel Institute
had done this beautiful research, the report on the statistics
from a Project blue Book and the Air Force that
was again kept secrets, and there are many little manipulations
that I've written about. At that time, doctor Heinech was there.
I discussed it with doctor Heinech. They felt that if
they released the information it would scare people too much,
and that they should first get the answer and then
organize how the answer would be delivered to their people.
I think that's a mistake. I think, you know, as
a as a father of two kids three grand kids,
I found out very much when there is a problem,
you should tell the kids. You shouldn't try to hide it.
You shouldn't try to you know, if there is a
problem in the house or somebody is ill in the family,
you should tell the truth. And if you don't, you're
going to create a lot of problems for yourself. And
it's the same thing here and the fact now we
should have told the truth, you know, at the time
of the Content commission, we didn't. That was very disappointing.
I mean at that point I resigned from the things
I was doing in Chicago, and my wife and I
went back to France because I felt, if that's American science,
I don't want any part of it, you know, the
New York Times and using the negative conclude usions of
the content committee, uh and uh, and then people standing
up on the five o'clock news, you know, saying, go
go on with your life. There is nothing to UFOs.
I mean, those were lives that were organized and planted
and so on. And I thought, if that's a meericon science,
you know, I don't want to be top of that.
I came back eventually because because I found a way
to get back into science. The if we the problem
now is that you have it's not a question of disclosure.
I mean the disclosure is would be would be pointless
because everybody knows about it. I mean, it's not just
a few pilots you know in f eighteen. It's every
farmer you talk to in in in Texas or in
Kansas is going to tell you Yeah, I mean we
you know, we've seen them, and my kids, I've seen
them with the pictures of them with it scares my cattle,
you know. And look at the things with the bigger
old ranch now in uh, you know, and you know
it's it's all over the all over the place. So
people know that it's there and who's kidding.
Speaker 4: Uh.
Speaker 2: So the only people who don't know it's there are
you know, in in Washington. So if now, if we
don't come clean with everything we can tell, uh we're
going to stop a conspiracy climate in the country. That's
going to be very difficult, you know, and people just
mistrusting the government about everything, you know, if they don't
tell us about this, which we already know, right and
we've heard from the scientists who actually work on it,
And if they don't come clean with that, what do
we know? What is it we don't know? You know,
what are the potential threats? Tell us? And that's the
main thing that I hear from, you know, when I
go visit the farm or a ranch somewhere, they said,
you know, why don't they tell us? You know, this
is this is hurting my cattle? He said, Guy told me,
I go into when I do an investigation, you know,
I go to the site and i'm they know I'm coming,
and they give me a cup of coffee. We talk
about and they've seen. And then I always ask a question,
do any of your neighbors, you know, have they seen anything?
And often people will say, oh, yea, yeah, you know,
so and so down the street. Uh, you know, he
had something happened to his cattle and so and he's
never reported it, but you know, we talk about it
at the market. His wife talked to my wife and
and so I go there. I knock on the door
and I say, you know, your neighbor says, you saw something.
I'm a scientist. I'm trying to understand. And those are
the best cases because they will never reported to anybody,
not to the air Force, not to the government, not
to the police, you know, not to the shehrif it's
just here, say, within the community. I love those because
it's it's you know, straight straightforward. And I went like
that one evening to our house where something had happened
to the cattle. And I go in and there's a
gun next to the door. And we start talking to
the people and I say, what's the gun for? And
he says, well, the next time this light comes over
my ranch, I'm going to should the hell out of it. Okay, now,
this is this is real. Okay, this is not something
right somebody made up it in Hollywood. You know that's
real that that that gun is roaded and uh, the
this is not healthy. I mean we should tell people
and what do we know? What is it? We don't
know what are the potential dangers here? You know, what
what should people be prepared for? And he said, you know,
now we bring this to my cattle, are they going
to do the same thing to my kids tomorrow? All right?
Take them up, mutilate them, kill them, you know they
and that is not health. This is not the way
government should be hit. So that's you know, that's that's
my that's my problem. All all the candidates for presidents say,
you know, there's always a report in the room who says,
are you going to disclose the books about UFOs and
all the records? And they say, sure, yes, uh, you know, hey,
I Clinton said she was going to disclose everything. Of course,
President Trump said that he hasn't disclosed anything yet. I
think what happens is that so far, you know, they
may have been vice president, they were not president of
the United States. The moment your president, they're going to
take you to a place downstairs, closed the door, and
the two guys and you know, jeans and no tie
are going to tell you and all the things you
need to know to run the country. And I think
that's after that you're not going to want to disclose
a number of things, because you those are the things
that you may have to face and the things that
you may have to work with. When President Roosevelt died,
something I researched when I wrote my book about Trinity. Uh,
mister Truman was adjusting his tie to go to a
gala evening with his wife. His wife was uh uh,
you know, was dressed for the occasion. A guy from
the White House drove to Truman's home in his own
car and approached Truman. Then said, mister President, the President
Roosebel died this afternoon. You need to come with me
to the White House. Truman excuses himself from the gala evening,
gets into the guy's car. They go to the White House.
They go down to the basement and they tell him
about the atom bomb. He had not been cleared for
what happened in New Mexico, and that he would have
to make the decision whether to use the atom bomb
against Japan or not. Now can you imagine something like that?
I mean is essentially an average businessman from Kansas, very bright,
extremely honest, extremely wholesome in his life. He was vice
president because he could bring in votes for Roosevelt. Roosevelt
was in poor health and was hiding it that he died. Suddenly,
all of a sudden, you were in the basement of
the White House and you're told the secret. The budget
for the for Trinity was the largest project in their
history of man, the largest amount of money. The money
was hidden in three different ways through contracts with different
companies that had nothing to do with the Atombau. And
one of them was a land development project for the
army where they put Oakridge the reactors were supposed to be.
It was supposed to be a gravel pit. The army
needs gravel to build roads and no airports soon. Of course,
the Army was the air Force at the time. There
was no air Force. The Army who was building the airports.
So you need a lot of gravel and that's so
there's gravel there. So they they got all the farmers
out of the area within one hundred miles and this
was hidden between two hills and they built the cotch.
The budget was a budget for getting gravel to the army.
There were two other hidden budgets and and the you
know that senators were not aware of it. Congress was
not aware of it, and the Vice President of the
United States had not been briefed. So people need to
understand that there are secrets at that level that led intimately.
That's why, you know, I don't want to go too
much about the best project and all that, because I'm
there are some things I know, some things I've participated in.
I have my own conclusions about UFOs, but you know,
I'm going to work within the structure. I respect the structure.
I just think that mistakes are being made because it's
not one secret. You know, there are people around saying, well,
you know, my classification is such that I have access
to certain things people don't know. Well, you know, it's
good for you. What about the other six things? You know,
because it's going to involve religion, it's going to involve
our relationship with certain countries that we need to talk
to if we want to solve this, because their files
are at least that's good, if not better than our.
I think there are indications that the Russians have progressed
in terms of understanding the problem, have progressed much further
than we have at the government. Okay, those are indications
from reading their literature, not their political stuff, reading the
sum islat. So those are powerful, important, dangerous things, and
they are getting more and more dangerous from more we
keep them locked up.
Speaker 1: So I became, you know, kind of new to the
whole UFO topic that I actually became interested in it
when I saw Close Encounters of the Third kind. I
think I was probably eight or nine years old, and
I would love to know how you got involved with
the movie and what your thoughts are on being portrayed
in the movie by actor and saw true far probably
butchering the French there.
Speaker 2: But you know, Steven Spielberg was was very young at
the time, so was I. We I met him who
a Hollywood journalist, the woman who had followed the development
of the movie in Hollywood, and and she invited both
of us for lunch. So it was a very informal
thing and it was it was actually a lot of fun.
And Spielberg said that, uh, you know, initially that that
character was based I think on a cloak poor air
in France who had been very close to doctor Heinek
and and so and uh. Then as as the script,
the script wasn't finished. There were big holes in the
script which were you know, a problem for Spielberg, and
he said he just came from JPL, and he said,
they're all walking around with lots of gadgets and and
it was all very confusing, and he didn't get a
clear idea for the movie from being at the Jet
Propelsion Lab. So he was still looking for for things.
And the character evolved and became someone who where he
was in the United States working with the team, and
and that's when when he said the new character was
based on me. So it's it's probably a mixture of
Claude Pohre, who is still a good friend of mine
and myself. So we we had an enjoyable couple of lunches, actually,
and he said that one of the and I gave
him some some of the actual incidents that I had researched.
And there is one where the witness saw a UFO
at a crossroad and there was a panel, a road
panel there that started vibrating when the object was above.
And that's one of the scenes that made it into
into the movie, showing the physical effect of the force
from from whatever is coming. And then one of the
big hole in the movie he told us at lunch,
was that how to discover the place where it's actually
going to happen, because they want to meet, of course,
to meet the craft. And I said, well, you know,
maybe a simple thing would be to have people with
theodolites and the little telescopes that would point to the
place where the signal comes from and then you triangulate
and and he said, yeah, that would work, but there
are two problems with your idea. Number one, it's too
long to explain, and number two, it's not funny. So
then then I felt about something that photograph that was
on the desk of doctor Heinek at Northwestern University, and
that photograph showed a big globe, you know, scree meter diameter,
and three people, including one who was Heinek, climbing on
top of the globe on a ladder with a piece
of string and the others were trying to fit the
string across the globe. And I asked alan An. I
told that story to Spielbert and I had asked doctor Heinek,
you know what's what happened there? And he said he laughed,
and he said, you know, the night of Sputnik one,
October nineteen fifty seven, nobody expected this to happen. The
New York Times calls the director of Harvard Observatory at
three o'clock in the morning, wakes him up and says,
can we have a comment about the Russian satellite? He said,
what Russian satellite? There? There isn't a Russian satellite. They said, oh, yes,
there is, and they gave him the whole story. So
he gets dressed. He calls Heinek, he calls another astronomer
and they meet indoorn Abby at Harvard where there's this
big globe and they try to fit a strain. They
don't have a computer program that can compute the satellite orbit.
They think they have another couple of years to do that,
and of course it's going to be an American satellite.
Well it isn't an can satellite. It's a Russian satellite,
and they have no way of computing the orbit. So
that that photograph is very funny, and Spielberg says, you know,
that's it. They say that. The general who is in
charge of the whole expedition says the translator for the
French guy says, you know, I used to be a geographer.
In these numbers that they are sending us that looks
like coordinates longitude and latitude, and the general says, well,
you know where is it? And nobody has a map,
and it seems to be in Wyoming and they break
in to the museum next door. They okay, there happens
to be a museum next door, and they steal the
big globe and they bring the globe overhead, you know,
all the way and they find, you know, the the
place in Wyoming with the big rock tower, and that's
far the thing is going to be. So that scene
I never I was never paid as a consultant for that,
but that scene came from from our meeting and that
was That was great. That was just a lot of fun.
Speaker 1: I know that there. I know that Steven Spielberg is
working on another UFO movie that I'm not sure when
it comes out. So so I have to ask, are
you involved with that project at all?
Speaker 2: I am not. I am not. I think we're maybe
doctor Nolan is you know that's our next the next generation,
UH is going to be I'm going to be put
to work.
Speaker 1: Well, Jacques, thank you very much for joining us. It
was a pleasure having you on and UH look forward
to meeting you in person.
Speaker 2: Thank you. So it's been great pleasure.
Speaker 1: Thank you so much, all right, Jacques Beallet, Ladies and gentlemen,