Jacques Vallée

High-Level Overview

Joe Rogan talks with Jacques Vallée, the French-born astronomer, computer scientist, venture capitalist and veteran researcher of unidentified aerial phenomena, whose new book is Forbidden Science 6: Scattered Castles, his journals from 2010 to 2019. Vallée recounts helping launch the psychic research program at SRI in the 1970s and training in remote viewing with artist Ingo Swann, then turns to his central work: carefully documenting UFO reports going back centuries, investigating classic landing cases like Socorro and Valensole, and analyzing physical samples with Stanford's Garry Nolan.

The tone is calm, precise and thoughtful, with Vallée repeatedly separating what can be explained from what cannot, and Rogan balancing fascination with skepticism about hoaxes and grifters. The conversation moves from parapsychology to historical sightings, government files and material analysis, military deception technology, and finally Vallée's own experiences, including a sighting at 15 and a terrifying out-of-body encounter.

The Discussion Explores:

• Parapsychology at SRI: how Vallée argued for Puthoff and Targ's research while working on the early ARPANET.
• Remote viewing in practice: Ingo Swann's coordinate method, catching a fleeting signal, and Joe McMoneagle's submarine description.
• Intuition in history and business: Patton, oracles, and picking winning founders in venture capital.
• Historical and cultural records: a Burgundy token, old paintings, Sahara rock art, and why testimony matters more than art.
• The explainable 95 percent and the other 5 percent: France's official investigations, Project Blue Book, and a 1950s radar case.
• Three egg-shaped landings: Trinity, Socorro and Valensole, their small air-breathing beings and physical traces.
• Physical evidence and military deception: isotope analysis of a molten metal mass, the Nimitz infrared image, and radar spoofing.
• Other dimensions and personal experiences: a universe five minutes away, simulations, and Vallée's own encounters.

Deep Dive into Main Ideas

Bringing psychic research into SRI

Vallée begins with a 1974 memory from Stanford Research Institute, where he worked on the ARPANET, the precursor of the internet, when there were roughly 30 connected machines. A vice president came to his office worried about a proposal from Hal Puthoff and Russell Targ to study parapsychology: at most a million dollars a year in funding, against a division managing $150 million of work for clients like Xerox, IBM, AT&T and Bank of America. Vallée argued that clients pay SRI precisely because it takes risks they can't, and wrote a confidential two-page memo to the board explaining why the evidence justified rigorous research. The project was approved and kept being funded as results came in.

He explains that earlier parapsychology had been studied by psychologists, while the SRI work aimed to bring physics into it, because in physics those things are not supposed to happen. Rogan brings up research suggesting humans may sense the Earth's magnetic field like birds, and The Telepathy Tapes, a podcast documenting nonverbal autistic children who appear to know what others are seeing. Vallée notes that Pacific navigators had gifted people who guided canoes without compasses, and suggests such abilities may be dormant capacities that language and modern life have eroded. He adds that some Silicon Valley companies recruit young people with unusual cognitive gifts.

Learning remote viewing from Ingo Swann

New York artist Ingo Swann, a star subject at SRI, wanted to apply psychic abilities to science and intelligence work, which was funded partly by intelligence agencies interested in Soviet developments; Vallée says remote viewing even located a lost Russian spacecraft in an African jungle. He explained to Swann how computers address data: directly, indirectly, or by computing the address of information stored elsewhere. From that conversation, he says, Swann developed coordinate remote viewing, using latitude and longitude as the address.

Later, Vallée worked with Swann two mornings a week for a year in a bare, windowless room. Swann would read coordinates; Vallée would make a quick scribble, called an ideogram, of his first impression. Swann's theory was that anyone can receive the signal, but it is overwhelmingly large and fleeting, so the skill is to catch and recall it repeatedly without interpretation. "You shouldn't try to name it", Vallée says, because naming hands it to the logical half of the brain; such guesses are labeled as errors. Once, given coordinates, he immediately felt freezing cold, dizzy and terrified of falling; the target was a peak in the Andes. Swann sent him home to hold onto the feeling rather than dilute it. Vallée says he is not reliably psychic and warns you shouldn't use him to aim missiles, but names Joe McMoneagle as probably the best remote viewer alive: he described a giant Soviet submarine being built inside a windowless building away from the sea, which the Navy laughed at until the Soviets dug a channel and launched it.

Intuition from Patton to venture capital

Vallée tells the story, shown in the film Patton and which he says he checked as historically accurate, of General Patton directing his driver to an unmarked battlefield where he believed he had fought as a Roman against Hannibal. He sees similar intuition in venture capital, where he has run funds: with ten capable engineering teams, one will succeed, and the investor's job is to sense which founder will choose the right road. Money and technology aren't the key; it's the mind of the driver. He notes that ancient kings consulted seers like the Greek Pythia, and that Hitler relied on such beliefs but trusted them too much while using drugs.

Rogan observes that the problem with seers has always been telling charlatans from the real thing, and that modern science dismisses the whole area. Vallée responds that "the burden is on you as a scientist to come up with an experiment" that separates real effects from chance, and notes that California, unlike rigidly structured France, has people willing to put a few million dollars into risky research.

Five percent that can't be explained away

France has an official UFO project, Vallée explains, a small team that can draw on meteorologists, the air force and radar experts, and it finds rational explanations for about 95 percent of reports, which he agrees with. These are rarely hoaxes: people genuinely see the moon rising through fog or one of 200 to 250 physical phenomena that can surprise an observer. "The other 5% is in your face." He cites a 1950s French Air Force report of a jet over Morocco, tracked on radar, chasing an object that shot to the top of the atmosphere in a fraction of a second, much like the Nimitz case decades later.

As a graduate student at Northwestern working with astronomer J. Allen Hynek, Vallée persuaded the Air Force to computerize Project Blue Book's paper files onto punch cards, and spent three days on base with Major Quintanilla's staff. The Air Force was right that most cases were explainable, but hundreds were not, and the physical samples they collected were eventually thrown away. One starred, classified case, he learned from Hynek, was a woman in Alaska reporting a lit object heading west at sunset; it was listed as unidentified as an inside joke, because it was actually a U-2 spy plane catching the sunlight.

Centuries of consistent reports

Vallée gives Rogan a centuries-old token from Burgundy, issued by a duke raising money for an army, that depicts a disc hovering over the land, protecting it from arrows raining from the sky. Rogan suggests it could simply be a shield, and Vallée acknowledges it doesn't prove anyone saw a flying saucer, only that the idea of disc-shaped objects has long been present. They look at Renaissance paintings with craft-like objects in the sky and Sahara rock art from the Tassili region, but Vallée explains that in his historical research he excluded artwork and isolated strange figures, requiring actual testimony of a flying device, because paintings were often made centuries after the events they depict.

He stresses that agricultural peoples knew their skies intimately, so their descriptions have scientific value when placed in context. Rogan, who has read several of Vallée's books, says what impresses him is how similar reports are across the 1700s, 1800s and 20th century, long before modern pop culture images. Vallée adds that his richest data isn't from the Pentagon but from visiting witnesses directly, sometimes staying for lunch and talking to the family and farmhands, a pool he says is ten times bigger than official data. Common shapes include discs, cigars with lit openings, and balls of light that physicists call plasma, although plasma shouldn't last minutes in air.

Trinity, Socorro and Valensole

Vallée and researcher Paola Harris wrote Trinity, now republished after further research, about three cases involving egg-shaped craft about the size of a mid-sized truck. The first, in 1945 near the Trinity test site, was seen arriving and crashing by witnesses who then watched its recovery, two years before Roswell. In all three cases, he says, the beings were about three to three-and-a-half feet tall, appeared to breathe our air, had two eyes and small noses and mouths, and communicated in ways witnesses described as images in their minds, with messages they were reluctant to share that felt almost religious, about a larger meaning of life. Rogan asks whether they might be artificial rather than biological, and Vallée says he has asked Garry Nolan about such questions.

The Socorro, New Mexico case was investigated by local and state police, the FBI and military experts before Hynek was sent in; patrolman Lonnie Zamora wanted to confess to a priest before talking. Vallée says it was falsely called a one-witness case: a driver reported the oval object passing right over his car, others saw it take off, and Vallée found an unpublished transcript in which the head of the White Sands motor pool described his car dying beneath a brightening light and had it disassembled piece by piece without finding any cause. In Valensole, France, a lavender farmer and former Resistance fighter found an egg-shaped craft in his field at 5 a.m. and was paralyzed by a device pointed at him while remaining upright and aware, before the craft vanished. Vallée visited him with a French official and says the farmer believed something would happen again. He criticizes current Washington investigations for focusing on the last 12 months of blurry lights instead of these detailed federal records.

Physical evidence and the right way to analyze it

Vallée describes a case from a week before Christmas 1977 in an Iowa suburb across the river from Omaha: park visitors saw a round object with rotating lights, then about half a ton of glowing molten metal fell on a levee in freezing weather, setting the grass on fire. Police and firefighters photographed it, and a local steel company confirmed its furnaces were empty over the weekend. Vallée gives Rogan a piece. With Garry Nolan and colleagues at Stanford, he analyzed samples with two different instrument systems, including a French machine costing about $6 million, and found no manipulated isotope ratios. After reviewers who were materials experts demanded about a year of additional work, the paper was published in a peer-reviewed journal.

He sees that as validation of the method rather than a failure, a stake in the ground showing the steps any strange sample must pass. "In science, you don't start from the conclusions", he says. He mentions that the late Stanford astrophysicist Peter Sturrock, whom he worked for, analyzed material from a Brazilian case and gave his samples to Vallée, who passed them to Nolan. He also complains that labs examining another intriguing sample scraped off its interesting red deposits despite signing agreements not to.

What the Nimitz image really shows, and how radar can lie

Vallée points out that the famous Tic Tac image from the Nimitz case is widely called a photograph but isn't: "It's an image. It's not a photograph." He describes a wry memo from Raytheon reminding the Navy that the pod was built to read the heat signature of enemy exhaust, not to track flying saucers. He also recounts learning, about 30 years ago, of an unclassified digital radar feedback device that records the characteristics of radars painting an aircraft and can feed back false signals, making a small plane look like a B-52 elsewhere or appear to vanish and reappear. Jamie finds a January paper on a Chinese electronic warfare device that makes small drones appear stadium-sized on radar.

Vallée adds that a Silicon Valley colleague with a distinguished Army career told him he had flown missions dressed up with lights to look like UFOs, testing whether guards at nuclear facilities would hesitate to fire, and another member of the Bigelow-run, DIA-funded project confirmed this. Rogan says this throws a lot into question, especially since sightings cluster near military training areas, but notes it can't explain visual encounters like the Tic Tac or the sheer number of similar historical reports.

Other dimensions, simulations and personal encounters

Vallée saw a disc at about 15 in 1955, hovering silently over a church steeple near his home outside Paris: silver, lens-shaped, with a clear dome. A school friend saw it through binoculars and drew the same shape. His father, a judge, dismissed it as a new jet, and the family kept quiet. Later, tracking satellites at the Paris Observatory, he explained most public reports but kept the unexplained ones on file. He shares a story from a CEO who, driving him to Dulles airport decades after inviting him to lecture at her school, described seeing an object twice the size of a 747 with lit portals that gradually faded into a clear sky without speeding up. She refused to be named, as do many Silicon Valley executives who tell him about sightings.

That fading, and the unchanging look of craft across centuries, lead Vallée to speculate beyond conventional propulsion: interstellar distances don't matter if "there could be another universe five minutes ahead of us". He takes the simulation hypothesis of his friend Rizwan Virk seriously but isn't satisfied by it, noting coincidences like the moon exactly covering the sun. He describes trying mental experiments to invite a manifestation, then being thrown out of his body one night into another room with a massive, dark rectangular entity that seemed aware; he woke screaming and has never tried again, and Rogan compares it to the monolith in 2001. He says Federico Faggin, a Silicon Valley pioneer he calls a mentor, had out-of-body experiences and saw a chip design that way. And on the final night before selling their forest property after 18 years, his wife saw a shapeless mass of blue-white light illuminate the forest and glide silently down the driveway.

Conclusion

Jacques Vallée offers a rare combination: decades of firsthand involvement in remote viewing, government UFO files and physical sample analysis, delivered with a scientist's caution. He agrees that most sightings have ordinary explanations, but insists the remaining cases, consistent across centuries and often backed by multiple witnesses, traces and official records, deserve real scientific attention rather than a focus on recent blurry videos. He shows what rigor looks like, from not naming impressions in remote viewing to having materials experts vet an analysis, while openly acknowledging military deception technology and hoaxers. His willingness to consider other dimensions and share his own unsettling experiences makes this a thoughtful, grounded conversation for anyone curious about the unexplained.

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