Joe Rogan Experience #1574 - Jacques Vallee & James Fox

1. 0:00 – 15:00

   (drum music) Joe Rogan podcast,…

   1. JFJames Fox0:02

      (drum music) Joe Rogan podcast, check it out.

   2. NANarrator0:04

      The Joe Rogan Experience.

   3. JRJoe Rogan0:06

      Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night. All day. (rock music) Gentlemen, James, Jacques, welcome. Thanks for being here. Uh, we'll explain, uh, what this is all about 'cause, uh, on the new Spotify podcast we don't really have an intro the same way the old ones did. Um, James, you produced a phenomenal documentary on the phenomenon, on what's going on with, uh, UFOs. And I just sent you an- an article that my friend, Saga sent me today, uh, about a photograph, a very clear photograph that they've taken of this, uh, triangular UFO. Um, so there's something that we'll be talking about in a little bit. Uh, Jacques Vallée, uh, you have been studying this most of your life.

   4. JVJacques Vallée0:54

      Too long.

   5. JRJoe Rogan0:54

      Too long. (laughs)

   6. JVJacques Vallée0:56

      (laughs)

   7. JRJoe Rogan0:56

      We did- we discussed it last night at dinner that, um, your interest in this came from an experience that you actually had as a child, you actually saw a UFO.

   8. JVJacques Vallée1:05

      As a t- as a teenager with two other witnesses. Uh, one of the witnesses was half a mile away with binoculars so I'm pretty sure that, um, that that object was real and it was, uh, 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, uh, you know, we're here many years later and we still don't have anything like that. It was just hovering and it was there.

   9. JRJoe Rogan1:41

      And w- you've been studying this for so long and this is, uh, something you guys talked about on 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.

   10. JVJacques Vallée1:54

       Well, S-

   11. JRJoe Rogan1:55

       The Steven Spielberg film.

   12. JVJacques Vallée1:56

       Spielberg was intrigued with the idea of a- of a character that was not quite as weird as, you know, the ETs, but was a lot weirder than, you know, the- 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 and he felt, you know, F- Frenchmen was- was the right thing to do.

   13. JRJoe Rogan2:20

       And so did you talk to him about the film? Did you talk to him about when- when he was putting it together and-

   14. JVJacques Vallée2:25

       Yeah, uh, I, uh, a journalist put us together when about halfway through the, you know, the- the final, uh, final shooting of the film. And there were- there were gaps in the movie at that point. And we, uh, we- so we had lunch twice together and, uh, it was- was a lot of fun. He- he was, at the time, he was looking for a transition between the time when they- they know the, you 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 I- he said, you know, he had spent the morning at the- 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, you know, two screens that give you an angle and- and the angle tells you where the thing is." And he said, "No, that's too complicated, you know, and takes too long. I- it, uh, it's got to be just a few minutes in the film." And then I- I thought of a photograph that was on the desk of Dr. Hynek, you know, Dr. J. Allen Hynek-

   15. JRJoe Rogan3:39

       J. Allen Hynek.

   16. JVJacques Vallée3:39

       ... who was, uh, the Air Force consultant on UFOs at the time. And I was working with him building databases and so on. And i- on that photograph, there were three guys, you know, really well dressed on ladders around a huge, um, sphere of the Earth in the lobby of some building somewhere with pieces of string that they were- they were putting the string over the Earth. And I- I- I told Dr. Hynek, I said, "Allen, you know, what's the story behind this?" And- and he said, "Well, the- when the first Sputnik was launched, you know, October '57, nobody had a computer program to compute an orbit, but they knew where the- 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 they b- The New York Times called the director of Harvard Observatory saying, um, "Can you give us a comment on the Russian satellite?" And the guy said, "Hey, it's 3:00 in the morning, you know, what Russian satellite?" And so they got dressed in a hurry and they- they were trying to compute the orbit by putting a string around the- a- around the model of the Earth in the lobby of the- uh, of Harvard. And I thought it was so funny and- and Spielberg said, "That's it?" You know, that's it. The- the general says, "Come on," uh, you know, you know, the- the geographer who is, uh, the interpreter of the French- of the French guy, uh, says, "Well, it looks like it's somewhere in Wyoming, you know, but where in Wyoming? You know, where should we go?" And the- the general says, "You mean we've got $10 billion worth of radar and, you know, cameras and everything else and nobody's got a map of Wyoming?" And they break into the lobby of the building next door and they come back with this globe and, you know, they've got the globe and they- they look at it- look at it and get their coordinates and because the- the- it turns out the geographer tells them, "You know, those signals, they look like a longitude and a latitude." So they- they- they criss, you know, they- they get the point where it's going to be and that's- that was the piece that was missing in- in the movie. So I was really proud of that, you know, it was- it was really fun.

   17. JRJoe Rogan6:06

       Well-

   18. JVJacques Vallée6:06

       Also, it's the one funny part in the movie.

   19. JRJoe Rogan6:09

       Yeah. It's a great movie. And it's, uh, it is probably the movie that got me most excited about UFOs when I was a kid. And I- I remember thinking-If UFOs were coming here from another planet, one thing that I remember thinking is, "Why would they even bother talking to the government? Like, what, what do they care who the government is?" Like, if, if I was looking at an ant colony, I'm, I'm not gonna ask the ant colony, "Which one's the m- the elected official that's in charge of all the other ants?" You don't give a shit. You're just, like, trying to study the ants. And I felt like if something was coming here from another planet that was so sophisticated it could either travel from another dimension or travel from another galaxy, why would it care, like, who the president is or who the generals are?

   20. JVJacques Vallée6:50

       You know, not only that, but the witnesses don't talk to the government either. You know, by now the witnesses are tired of being ridiculed by scientists and, you know, by... And told that those things don't exist. So they don't, they don't talk. So they'll talk to, you know, uh, people like you, people like me, uh, because they trust, you know, they, they trust me. And in Silicon Valley, you know, you wouldn't believe the number of people who come to me, you know, including CEOs of companies that I've worked with, who tell me about sightings that people in their family have had or sightings they had, including, you know, sightings in Vietnam, for example, and so on, when they were in the military, that, uh, have never been reported. And, and the government isn't getting that.

   21. JRJoe Rogan7:41

       When you first started studying this, James, when you started studying this phenomenon, when you were- were thinking that you were gonna put together this, this movie, what... Uh, you've done other documentaries on UFOs. What, what got you into this?

   22. JFJames Fox7:56

       So I had a really good friend of mine who was a high school buddy, this guy Rene. We traveled around Europe together after we graduated from high school. And in our early 20s he told me about this UFO crash in Roswell, in New Mexico. And I literally thought at the time, "I'm gonna have to write this guy off. I've lost my best friend. He's lost his mind." And, uh, and that was that. And I sort of walked away thinking, "God, we've had such a great friendship. I'm so sorry this guy's gone." And I brought it up with a guy that I was mentoring, he was my mentor, uh, at a production faci- excuse me, production facility in California, this guy Richard. And he goes, "Oh yeah, Roswell? Yeah, that was an alien spaceship that crashed. I mean, the government admitted it. I mean, they, they put the story out themselves. Those guys were the, the only bomb unit in the world, the 509th, exclusively responsible for the deployment of atomic weapons. These guys would not mistake an everyday weather balloon for a flying saucer." He goes, "That actually happened." And I went, "Really?" So then I started looking into it, and before I knew it, uh, I started making a movie.

   23. JRJoe Rogan9:06

       Wow. So, what, like, when you heard about Roswell, and you, you've investigated it now and you've gotten into it, what do you think that was?

   24. JFJames Fox9:16

       Well, I can only go by the people that were there. And, uh, Major Jesse Marcel was one of the first military officers on the scene. He's part of the 509th. And Major Marcel said the debris was strewn over an extremely large area, and it was material that was not of this earth. And he described the, the, the material was one chu- one chunk in particular was three to four feet long, three feet wide, light as a feather, you could barely feel it in your hands when you carried it. But they couldn't destroy it with a blowtorch, they couldn't destroy it with...

   25. JRJoe Rogan9:52

       This photo you're showing us right now, Jamie, is the debris that they threw on the floor that was clearly just aluminum foil and sticks and-

   26. JFJames Fox10:01

       That's the-

   27. JRJoe Rogan10:01

       ... stuff from a weather balloon.

   28. JFJames Fox10:02

       That's the fake debris.

   29. JRJoe Rogan10:03

       Yeah. Well, they, there's two stories, right? There was a story that came out the first day that said, "We've recovered a crashed UFO." And then there's a story that came out the second day, "Whoops, it was a weather balloon." And, uh, this was after they had taken the wreckage and they flew it to Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. And it wasn't what you would do with wreckage from a weather balloon. What they'd done is they'd flown it in two separate jets, or, uh, planes, I don't know if there were even jets back then. Two separate planes to make sure that they had at least some of it. Like, if one of them crashed, they at least had some of this stuff. And to this day there's people that were there that swear that this was something that was from an alien world. And then you've got all the debunkers and all the other people that swear that it's nonsense and that people are just making things up. And they get a lot of attention from this. And so they're, you know, they've been telling these stories for decades and th- they might even believe it themselves but it's all bullshit.

   30. JVJacques Vallée11:02

       Well, m- my approach to that is, you know, no single case... And I think the, the scientists are not completely to blame there. No single case can, can prove either that we're being visited or even that there is a phenomenon here on Earth that we still need to be discovering. You, you need to... I've been trained to look for patterns. You know, my, my background is in artificial intelligence and computer science. And you look for patterns, whether it's in medicine, in business, you know, in, in, in other fields, in physics. And one case even as, as good as Roswell is, you know, that doesn't do it. So I've been looking for other cases that can reinforce a pattern and reveal, you know, what is, what is really behind it. Because the idea that it's just ET coming here, that doesn't really answer all the questions we have.
2. 15:00 – 30:00

   But did they find…

   1. JVJacques Vallée15:00

      into the nucleus of the atom. They would be the same ones in outer space when they are on the Earth, okay? Um, what could change would be if somebody was altering artificially the ratio of the isotopes within the elements. So it gets pretty complicated. Uh, we're doing... We're, we're doing a survey of all the samples that we have from a number of crashes like Roswell. Roswell was not unique. It was not unique in New Mexico and now we have, we have samples from Europe, we have samples from South America. Uh, there are a number of people who have started to look at that. There were publications by a professor from Stanford, Professor Sturac, 30 years ago about, um, material recovered from Brazil, uh, where, again, the, the isotopes were measured. I'm the guy who... Uh, he, um... The French volunteered to measure the isotope ratios and I carried that, you know, that precious little sample to, to Paris to get it to the people who were, were doing the experiments. Uh, the jury is still out. Um, obviously somebody could take, you know, common elements, refine the isotopes and put them back together. Um, the... Of course that was done for the atom bomb, you know? It were between different isotopes of uranium, you know, and you have to, um, uh, differentiate between, you know, which... W- what goes into really making the bomb. And now you can buy, for medicine for example, you can buy radioisotopes in small quantities, but they cost, you know, an enormous amount for a few grams. Uh, so if we find that some of those samples have been altered, that's a revolution because it means that there is somebody somewhere, either on Earth or off-planet who has the technology to do that for a particular purpose. If we find that, that's a revolution.

   2. JRJoe Rogan17:13

      But did they find that with Roswell? Was... Is there any record of what happened with the wreckage, what, what was studied, what they discovered?

   3. JVJacques Vallée17:23

      S- so, uh, uh, you have to go in two directions. First, you, you don't need something, you know, three feet by five feet to do that. You can do it on a few grams, okay? Uh, we've got instruments now, new instruments that, that, uh, w- were created by some of the people that I work with that can just do it at the biological level, you know, like almost the level of a, you know, a few, a few grams or a few milligrams. So, uh, w- we're in the process of doing that and in fact the, the book that I'm preparing is going to talk about that. Uh, the other thing is, you know, where would the, the big thing go? You know, we don't have the big thing.

   4. JRJoe Rogan18:10

      Yeah.

   5. JVJacques Vallée18:10

      Um, well, you know, after a few years people talk and again, uh, both in Silicon Valley and other places, scientists need to talk to each other. And I've had...... discussions with people who handle that material. One of them I can tell you about was, uh, a, a very high level, um, engineering manager in a, a large company that has research labs in, in Silicon Valley. He was asked 30 years ago to look at some material and he described to me what that was. And actually he show- showed it to me. The... he said it was a matrix of orthosilicates, and he could not understand the deep structure. I mean, he could analyze it in his lab. Um, he was a man who developed the, uh, magnetic quoting for disks and tapes. So, I don't need to tell you how many billions of dollars of business those companies that he worked with, you know, uh, made based on his patents. So, he, he had a good lab and he, he was able to do the, the analysis. He could not understand the deep structure of that material. Now, the, the problem that the people who have those vehicles have is they will... because it's top secret, they have to compartmentalize everything. So, one company would get the material, another company might get some descriptions of maybe the beings. Another company might get some- something that looks like fiber optics or electronics. So, they wouldn't put... only a few people would be able to put all the information together. That's not a good way to do research. It's not a good way to, to do science. We've got to get that stuff to the scientific community and open it up.

   6. JRJoe Rogan20:19

      Well, this, this is, uh, what Bob Lazar had said about working at Area S-4. That that was the problem they were having. One group was working on propulsion, the other group was working on metallurgy. But this material that this gentleman had seen, where he couldn't identify the structure, what was that and where was it from?

   7. JVJacques Vallée20:38

      It was from a crash.

   8. JRJoe Rogan20:39

      From a crash? Where?

   9. JVJacques Vallée20:40

      He didn't tell me.

   10. JRJoe Rogan20:41

       He didn't tell you?

   11. JVJacques Vallée20:42

       No.

   12. JRJoe Rogan20:43

       But they had... and he had gotten it through what method?

   13. JVJacques Vallée20:47

       Uh, he had been asked on a secret project, to do the analysis.

   14. JRJoe Rogan20:53

       So, this had been something the government had brought to him?

   15. JVJacques Vallée20:55

       Because he was... he had a lab that was unique in the United States. And, you know, that was... he was the appropriate guy.

   16. JRJoe Rogan21:02

       Is it possible that this could have been some material that was created by a foreign government that has an extremely advanced understanding of these materials?

   17. JVJacques Vallée21:14

       If it had been, that material would have been used by now and we've never seen that material again.

   18. JRJoe Rogan21:21

       And what year was this when he did the study?

   19. JVJacques Vallée21:23

       Um, I don't know when he did the study. Uh, he's dead now, so he's not going to be-

   20. JRJoe Rogan21:29

       Right.

   21. JVJacques Vallée21:30

       ... you know, (laughs) uh, thrown in jail for.

   22. JRJoe Rogan21:30

       And because this is all top secret-

   23. JVJacques Vallée21:32

       This, you know... and... look, in, in Silicon Valley, people from different companies and so on get together and they, you know, they, they, they look at things together if they trust you. You know, because when... the, the, you, you need to get different minds on the same, on the same page.

   24. JRJoe Rogan21:51

       Right.

   25. JVJacques Vallée21:51

       And, you know. So, um, that conversation was over 20 years ago. I've never forgotten it. Uh, I had another conversation with a, a, a m- a military man who is, you know, retired now, who told me that he was brought in, um, to a large hangar where there were pieces of things that looked like a vehicle. And there was a wing that would have been, you know, the size of this table. And he could, he could lift it with one hand. It was, again, very light. You know, like what James was saying about Roswell. Extremely light material that was very, very strong. Well, still today we don't have anything like that. We've got fancy titanium things and so on, but he was... he knew what technology went into, you know, our advanced aircraft. He was with the Air Force and he couldn't believe that he could lift that, that entire metal, you know, surface with one hand.

   26. JRJoe Rogan22:56

       So, what is the current speculation on where the wreckage from Roswell went? Like, as far as people know, what people do talk. Like, it... clearly if there was some material that was recovered that was from an alien spacecraft, it must be somewhere.

   27. JVJacques Vallée23:12

       It would... well, typically, the, the, the way... you know, a secret project works, uh, if, if you look at other projects that we, we know now how they were handled, like the submarine, you know, the Russian submarine that was recovered, um... and, uh, it would go to different places because you, you'd send different parts to the best experts. Absolutely the best world experts in those... people you already have under contract. And y- you might not tell them, you know, where it comes from. You might tell them, "This is something, you know, one of our guys got this out of Czechoslovakia, you know, and we think it's Russian stuff from a MiG, you know."

   28. JRJoe Rogan24:03

       Mm-hmm.

   29. JVJacques Vallée24:04

       And, uh, "Why don't you analyze it?" They would, they wouldn't necessarily tell you that it comes from a UFO.

   30. JRJoe Rogan24:11

       Right.
3. 30:00 – 45:00

   Mm-hmm. …

   1. JVJacques Vallée30:00

      Harris-

   2. JVJamie Vernon30:00

      Mm-hmm.

   3. JVJacques Vallée30:01

      ... uh, who traveled with him, you know, in Europe. And, uh, published his book in, in Italy and other, other languages. His English book was censored by the publisher. And he, he died really, I mean, he was given the, you know, the, the proof, um, he had 24 hours to check the proof. He didn't check everything, he didn't have time. And there were parts that were missing and, and parts that...He had told me, fortunately, you know, I can testify to what he told me. But the, um, you know, a, a lot of what he knew wasn't in the book that was published in the US. It's in books that were published in other languages, you know, thanks to Paola, to Paola Harris, who preserved all that. But there was, you know, still at that stage, you know, there was some, you know, some tricks being played not to get all the information out.

   4. JRJoe Rogan31:00

      And this is something Clinton looked into-

   5. JVJacques Vallée31:02

      Uh-

   6. JRJoe Rogan31:02

      ... when he was president, right?

   7. JVJacques Vallée31:04

      The president wouldn't necessarily be cleared.

   8. JRJoe Rogan31:07

      That's hilarious.

   9. JVJacques Vallée31:08

      To, I mean, to, number one, I, to, I, oh, I, obviously I don't know the facts, but-

   10. JRJoe Rogan31:14

       But you would think that if you get-

   11. JVJacques Vallée31:15

       ... any, any protects-

   12. JRJoe Rogan31:16

       ... to the top office of the United States that you would get access to that. But I guess because you're, it's transient, because they're in and out.

   13. JVJacques Vallée31:23

       Well, it, it's not a matter of curiosity. It's a matter of, um, need to know. And you also want to protect the president. And also, the president changes every four years.

   14. JRJoe Rogan31:34

       Yeah.

   15. JVJacques Vallée31:35

       And also, there are three different classes of, of, uh, secrets, you know. There is, there are secrets that are under the control of the president. Uh, there are secrets that are under the control of the State Department that have to do with foreign intelligence that don't go through the same channels, and then there are the atomic secrets. And yet, the clearances for, you know, o- over the years have occasionally been cleared. I was cleared for the Bass Project under, you know, under Mr. Rigolo- Mr. Bigelow. Um, the, uh, but the, the, the clearances for atomic secrets are the P clearances, the Q clearances, the R clearances. They are completely segregated from the kind of clearances that we had as part of the, the, the, the Bass Project or the AATIP Project. So those people would not have been cleared for some of the scientific information. And I think we're getting to the point, uh, where we need to, somebody needs to open up the doors and the windows and get the scientific community involved.

   16. JRJoe Rogan32:56

       Well, it does seem like there's more openness now from the Penthouse, right? There was the one person who, who worked at the, the Pentagon, uh, that was saying that there's, they've recovered crafts that are off-world vehicles not from this earth. Like, that was a, that was a direct quote. And then these photos that supposedly exist now from this new article that's out that are top secret, but people are trying to get these photographs released to the general public, that show this triangular UFO. This, but just these kind of statements and just the release of the Go Fast video and the other videos, uh, from the, um, the, uh, the gimbal video that, that show these vehicles that are being observed by these fighter jet pilots that are watching these things in real time going, "Holy shit, what is that?" And you get to hear their words. You get to see the video. You see the actual object jetting across the, the, you know, the surface of the, of the ocean. And they don't know what it is, and they're trying to figure it out while they're watching it. Um, that's never existed before. There's never been this much openness. So there's a, a new level of at least admitting that there's an issue, that there's a phenomenon that didn't exist before.

   17. JVJacques Vallée34:12

       You're talking about the US.

   18. JRJoe Rogan34:14

       Yes.

   19. JVJacques Vallée34:14

       In other countries, people have been a lot more open.

   20. JRJoe Rogan34:17

       Yeah.

   21. JVJacques Vallée34:17

       Including Russia, you know. I mean, and, and inc- certainly including France. I mean, there was one, one incident in 1978, um, a Mirage, you know, a guy flying a Mirage, uh, full colonel French Air Force. The Mirage doesn't have any weapons. It's just coming in to Dijon, you know, Dijon, where the mustard comes from, okay? Well, they happen to have, you know, a base, an atomic base there. And they are, you know, the mi- the Mirages are fighter bombers. They can take, they can take nuclear ammunition. Uh, he was unarmed. He's flying at, you know, late afternoon, early evening. Uh, no problem. Sees a light at his two o'clock position, bright light. Doesn't know what it is. Gets bigger. He thinks he sees a structure behind the light, but he was never really sure, you know. There seems to be an object there, solid object. But the, the, the, the light goes around him and stops up on his tail, which is a kill position, you know, in, f- for a fighter, for a fighter jet. He doesn't like that. Um, he takes evasive action, which he wasn't prepared to do. I mean, he didn't have, you know, special suits or anything. He dives. Uh, the object starts moving again, goes around him, makes a 360-degree circle at high speed. At, and he can't believe it. I mean, there, number one, there couldn't be a pilot, because the pilot would be crushed. But there is nothing that can move that fast, and the thing is back on its tail. He has to dive a second time, okay? He lands in Dijon, writes a report. The report would probably not have come out except that there was a, there were a number of people on the ground who saw this happen, saw the whole thing. And there was a gendarme, you know, who was, uh, French police, uh, it's uh, a branch of, you know, parallel to the French police, who wrote a report, and that report was public. So they-... interviewed. They found the pilot, they interviewed him. I mean, there is no question that happened. And this was 1978. So, I mean, what else is new, okay, that we've got those things? Well, what's new is we have footage, you know.

   22. JFJames Fox36:47

       Mm-hmm.

   23. JVJacques Vallée36:47

       And some of the footage that James had in his, you know, in his movie, um, that actually proves it. But actually, you know, footage doesn't prove anything, because you can fake the camera. But when, when you have pe- the, the pilots themselves and the footage and the instrumentation and the radar ... I mean, that thing was tracked on radar that saw the whole thing, you know. Uh, you don't, you don't really do that to a nuclear bomber.

   24. JFJames Fox37:16

       Hmm.

   25. JRJoe Rogan37:16

       What ... You have something on this?

   26. JFJames Fox37:17

       Yeah. So this is a breaking story. And, uh, former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Intelligence, Christopher Mellon, uh, literally sent this to me about 15 minutes ago, and he wanted me to read it, uh, verbatim. So I was gonna read it. This is pretty startling stuff.

   27. JVJacques Vallée37:31

       Yeah, go ahead.

   28. JFJames Fox37:31

       So, I'll read it. "In the last, uh, 48 hours, the public has learned of two stunning incidents captured on film by US Navy carrier pilots earlier this year. One of the cases features a photo of a bizarre flying sphere and a black cube inside that is identical to dozens of other reports, uh, by Navy pilots. Uh, these strange objects have been shadowing East Coast naval ops since 2015. They sometimes maneuver in formation and have occasionally been reported achieving supersonic speeds. The other incident produced a stunning detailed photograph of a massive triangular-shaped vehicle that emerged from the ocean and flew vertically straight up and out of sight, just past a Navy F-18 operating off the US, uh, aircraft carrier. These iPhone photos taken by the pilots should be released to the public, as there are no sources and methods to protect, and the national security benefits of raising awareness regarding this issue vastly outweigh any conceivable benefit from concealing the information. It is hard to believe that in the face of such radical and incredible technology within our vast Defense Department, the only ... we only have a so-called taskforce consisting of two individuals with no budget, who are still being off- or stiff-armed for access to relevant and timely information by the Air Force and other security organizations. By comparison, 60 years ago, in response to Sputnik, America entered the space race which led to landing on the moon. Our government needs to wake up and address the far greater technology gap that these and many other incidents are revealing. There is obviously a glaring strategic mismatch between the current taskforce and the technology that has been identified."

   29. JRJoe Rogan39:30

       Why did he send you this?

   30. JFJames Fox39:31

       Because he feels it's a developing story and he wants people to be aware that there's r- really compelling evidence right now, photographically, that needs to be released.
4. 45:00 – 1:00:00

   This is an infrared…

   1. JFJames Fox45:00

      This is an infrared image, right? It's not, uh, visible. It's not a normal camera.

   2. JRJoe Rogan45:08

      I don't know. I don't know what it is. Is that what it looks like to you?

   3. JFJames Fox45:11

      I think it's the same type of camera that, uh, for- as the one from the Nimitz. So you're- you're looking at the heat signature. Uh, you're not really looking at a visual picture.

   4. JRJoe Rogan45:24

      Right.

   5. JFJames Fox45:24

      So that's- that's why it's not- not- you cannot get a clear definition of it.

   6. JRJoe Rogan45:30

      Well, they need better cameras. (laughing) So, if you go further ar- along in the video, it does, uh, they do get a better view of it. There it is. There you go. Like, what the hell is that?

   7. JFJames Fox45:43

      You know, that was one of the, uh, more startling, uh, moments of producing the film, The Phenomenon, for me, was when I met with Senator Harry Reid, who spearheaded the AATIP program, the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, that wound up on the front page of The New York Times. Um, I wasn't quite sure when I met with him how, where his comfort zone was. And so I was really kinda cautious for the first half an hour of the interview. But then I started, we started to relax and- and get more comfortable with each other, and I decided to kind of push it a little bit and I said, "Hey, uh, Senator, I, uh, met with Gordon Cooper," who later became Mercury astronaut, "who told me on camera that there was a landing incident that took place at Edwards Air Force Base circa 1957, where they happened to have a camera crew out, uh, near the dry lake bed capturing the installation of a new landing facility for F-86 fighter jets. And it was broad daylight, and all of a sudden this disc appears out of nowhere, and the camera crew turned their cameras on it and they filmed the landing of this flying saucer on the dry lake bed at Edwards Air Force Base." And I'm telling this story to Senator Reid thinking, you know, I don't know how he's gonna (laughs) react when I ... but this is what I w- I have him on camera. And, uh, and I said that he has the film footage developed, it was good footage, he held it up, he looked at it, it was a disc, you know, blah, blah, blah. And, uh, eventually he gets a courier jet from Washington DC that flies in, pick up the footage. Senator Reid goes, "And it was never seen or heard from again?" And I said, "Yeah, exactly." And I said, "Did you guys uncover stuff like that?" He goes, "Oh, yeah. It's all there. It's- we- we- we have it. It's all there." And then he goes to change the topic and talk about something else and I said, "Well, hold on, Senator. Uh, are you saying that there's evidence that hasn't seen the light of day?" And he looked at me and he kinda pauses and he picks up his water bottle and he drinks a sip of water and that- that- that moment seemed like an hour, but it was probably just a second or two.

   8. JRJoe Rogan47:42

      (laughs)

   9. JFJames Fox47:42

      And he puts his water bottle down and he says, "I'm saying that most of the evidence hasn't seen the light of day." So that- that for me was such a powerful moment because I'm going, "Look at who this is coming from." This is the former head of, you know, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid saying that the vast majority of evidence hasn't seen the light of day. And if the President of the United States can't get access to it, as I found out when I interviewed all the people around President, uh, Clinton, uh, who can? Who has the authority to have this stuff released? And that's something that I would love to know and I've been trying to find out.

   10. JRJoe Rogan48:20

       So someone does.

   11. JFJames Fox48:21

       Yeah.

   12. JRJoe Rogan48:21

       Someone in some position of government or some intelligence agency, someone in the Pentagon, someone or some group at the highest level of clearance has accessed this information and knows about it.

   13. JFJames Fox48:35

       Absolutely. Hey, Senator Reid said they uncovered all this stuff well during the program and he said the level of resistance that he got from the intelligence agencies was insane. Like I mean they did not want this project going forward at the Pentagon. But they pushed and they pushed and they pushed and they got it through. It started in 2007, it went all the way up until it ended up on the front page of The New York Times in 2017. And of course now we know there was another project, but Jacque do you know who has the authority to release this stuff to the general public?

   14. JVJacques Vallée49:06

       No, no. Eh, not, not in, in this particular case. If-

   15. JRJoe Rogan49:10

       Where are the bodies from Roswell?

   16. JVJacques Vallée49:14

       I don't know. I mean, they... You, you know, all you have are rumors, you know. Uh, Walter Reed Hospital, in the basement, you know. Uh, I can't get to the basement of Walter Reed Hospital.

   17. JRJoe Rogan49:26

       Have you ever talked to anybody that's reputable? Anybody that you believe-

   18. JVJacques Vallée49:30

       Yes.

   19. JRJoe Rogan49:30

       ... that seems to know?

   20. JVJacques Vallée49:32

       Yes. Well, they are-

   21. JRJoe Rogan49:33

       Yeah?

   22. JVJacques Vallée49:33

       You know, they are physicians in the, uh, you know, who, with clearances, who have tried to, to get that information. And to my knowledge, of course, I don't, they don't need to tell me everything, but, um, if there was... You know, if, if there is material evidence, like the, the kind of thing I've got, okay, that witnesses have given to me and all, that I went, went out and dug it up, okay? So I know where it comes from. Okay. But if we found that it was really very strange, even beyond our ability to manipulate the isotopes, that still doesn't prove that there isn't somebody who is smarter than we are, somewhere on Earth, making that stuff. Okay. So I still couldn't stand, you know, at the Academy of Sciences and say, "Look, this, this proves it." But if we have bodies, I, I would think that if, if that they have a different structure from any organism that we know, you know, from biology on Earth. I mean, uh, th- ... I would have to think that would be a revolution.

   23. JRJoe Rogan50:47

       The strange thing-

   24. JVJacques Vallée50:48

       Instantly, I mean.

   25. JRJoe Rogan50:49

       Yes, instantly.

   26. JVJacques Vallée50:49

       People would be confronted with it.

   27. JRJoe Rogan50:51

       The strange thing is that the iconic image of an alien seems consistent. That's one of the weird things is that there's different versions of aliens that people claim to see. But the iconic Close Encounters of the Third Kind, large head, large eyes-

   28. JVJacques Vallée51:06

       Yes.

   29. JRJoe Rogan51:06

       ... very thin body with no musculature, no genitals, that all seems to be very consistent.

   30. JVJacques Vallée51:13

       Correct.
5. 1:00:00 – 1:15:00

   Tha- there has been.…

   1. JRJoe Rogan1:00:00

      Like, the thing that-

   2. JVJacques Vallée1:00:01

      Tha- there has been.

   3. JRJoe Rogan1:00:02

      Really?

   4. JVJacques Vallée1:00:02

      Yes.

   5. JRJoe Rogan1:00:03

      What, what does-

   6. JVJacques Vallée1:00:03

      There have been people killed, f- apparently for no reason.

   7. JFJames Fox1:00:09

      Very rare, though.

   8. JRJoe Rogan1:00:10

      Where, where was this?

   9. JVJacques Vallée1:00:11

      Ten, twelve cases. There are, you know, I've spent ... I went to Brazil four times and I got to know Brazil and the data there pretty well. And I spoke to people in the Armed Forces, people in the president, you know, air force, and the police. Uh, there have been a number of, of cases where people died and, uh, uh, where witnesses died. And also cases where witnesses were chased through the jungle by objects with beams. And I was really interested in those beams because those beams were extensible. Well, it's, it's hard to make an extensible ... If you turn on a light or a laser, you know, it's going to keep going. It doesn't go-

   10. JRJoe Rogan1:00:59

       Mm-hmm.

   11. JVJacques Vallée1:00:59

       ... 10 feet and just stopping mid-air. Those beams stop, which means it's not just light, it's something else. And also, they, uh, they will pin you to, you know, a hammock, for example. Some of the people who are asleep in a hammock, they wake up and they see this light, and the light comes down and pins them.... to, to the bed or to the hammock. Um, and it, uh, I've, I've published pictures of injuries that people sustained as a result of those beams. So, you know, this is at least a demonstration of, you know, of the power that, uh, number one, we don't quite understand the technology, and number two, we don't understand why that is.

   12. JRJoe Rogan1:01:49

       And you're of the opinion that these things might not be from another planet. That they could be, they're interdimensional.

   13. JVJacques Vallée1:01:56

       So, yes. I'm amazed that, you know, I mean, in the '50s and '60s, uh, there was all that science fiction about, you know, aliens from other planets and so on, all those, all these movies. So that was... okay, and frankly, when I started looking at the statistics, trying to make sense, trying to build those databases, do AI on top of it, I was looking for, you know, ET, extraterrestrials. Now, we've got so much more data that contradicts that. Things coming through the wall of a bedroom, okay? As a, as a light, and the light turns into something else, and it has information in it, or it has, or it turns into something physical. You know, this is not, this is way off. I mean, these are not just vehicles that come from somewhere else. So-

   14. JRJoe Rogan1:02:51

       So it could be-

   15. JVJacques Vallée1:02:52

       ... there, so there are a number of contradictions in there.

   16. JRJoe Rogan1:02:54

       It could be there's a number of different non-related phenomena.

   17. JVJacques Vallée1:02:58

       Well, you know, to, to some extent, I mean, we keep saying that the scientists are skeptical and so on, but if you look at physics today, I mean, people will tell you there's probably more than, there must be more than four dimensions, you know, of space-time. Uh, there must be to explain, you know, uh, atomic phenomena, to explain quantum mechanics, to explain all those things. They, there, there could very well be. There are theories that are published in physics journals about multiple universes, about universes interpenetrating each other, maybe, uh, channels between those universes. There could be, you know, there could be another universe with a room like this five minutes ahead of us. Uh, we would never see them, we would never detect them. There could be another Earth five minutes ahead of us in another universe. And, um, we, physics today authorizes us to think about those things. Now, they, they think about those things not because of UFOs. They, they consider it because it makes sense in the theories they have to build to explain what they see in the lab, okay? In the, in the, uh, particle labs, in the accelerators, in detecting all these, uh, all these other layers of, of, of matter, of nature. But it, it, it implies that this isn't just, you know, not only the other planet, but this isn't the only universe.

   18. JFJames Fox1:04:37

       I was gonna say, Jacques, one of the assets that Jacques brought to this film, The Phenomenon, um, and he became involved through Lee Spiegel. And you could, you know, talk in a minute about your reluctance to get involved. But initially, Jacques was like, "Okay, well, I'll participate just this one little section." And eventually, I lured Jacques out to the studio, and we were editing the film at the end of this dirt road, uh, in a very remote area. We had a place that had no running water-

   19. JVJacques Vallée1:05:03

       (laughs)

   20. JFJames Fox1:05:03

       ... no internet, no toilet. (laughs) It's a long story, I was gonna get a, a better space, but I just couldn't find one, and we just got so much work done in this space that I decided to just edit the whole movie here. But-

   21. JVJacques Vallée1:05:14

       It was a little cabin in, in the woods on the, on the California coast. It was gorgeous, full of flowers and so on, but no facilities.

   22. JFJames Fox1:05:23

       None. Yeah.

   23. JVJacques Vallée1:05:23

       Just electricity some of the time.

   24. JFJames Fox1:05:25

       Yeah.

   25. JVJacques Vallée1:05:26

       And there were times when you-

   26. JFJames Fox1:05:27

       Yeah.

   27. JVJacques Vallée1:05:28

       ... uh, there wasn't even electricity. So-

   28. JFJames Fox1:05:29

       Oh, yeah. And Jacques would say, "Okay, I'm coming out for the weekend." He would do these marathon edits with us. And he'd say, "I got my face paint, I got my compass." (laughs)

   29. JVJacques Vallée1:05:37

       (laughs) "I'm coming out."

   30. JFJames Fox1:05:38

       And, and one of the first cases I think that you got involved with, speaking of beings, was Socorro, New Mexico, that involved a police officer in April of 1964. This is considered to be the most well-documented close encounter of the third kind, that's when the witness describes seeing beings associated with the craft, in US history. Turns out, when Jacques found out that I'd already spent five years investigating this case, I interviewed the m- the, the wife, I interviewed his coworkers, I interviewed his, his son, his daughter, and I went to the National Archives, and I got all these new documents. I reveal some of them in the movie. Jacques said to me, when I showed him this stuff, he said, "My gosh, I can't believe you're doing this case." He said, "I was at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in April of 1964 with Dr. Hynek." And you were telling Hynek, take it over about these-
6. 1:15:00 – 1:25:43

   Well, th- that was...…

   1. JFJames Fox1:15:00

      toed the party line during this entire time. But then afterwards, he left in 1969, the Air Force, and he s- founded the UFOs which basically proves that he believed... He did a 180 and he believed that we were not alone.

   2. JVJacques Vallée1:15:13

      Well, th- that was... He was waiting for a case like that. You know, I- I- I kept telling him, I kept showing him reports from all over the world, okay? And- and, uh, he still said, "I can't..." You know, "I- I- I believe those reports. I believe we have the same- same thing in the US." I convinced him of that, but he was waiting for a case where he could convince Sagan and Menzel and, you know, Dr. Menzel at Harvard and his colleagues in- in science because he knew those guys and they would believe Quintanilla rather than believing Hynek. And, you know, the problem at Socorro was there was only one witness.

   3. JFJames Fox1:15:57

      One witness who saw the beings, but there were n- number of witnesses that saw the craft.

   4. JVJacques Vallée1:16:01

      Saw the craft, yes, and there were theories that this was an experimental thing from White Sands. White Sands is, you know, 30 minutes away and it's full of things. And there was... The other explanation was it's a test for, uh, lunar landing-

   5. JFJames Fox1:16:17

      Yeah.

   6. JVJacques Vallée1:16:17

      ... you know, um, system and so on. It doesn't look anything like the- the lunar lander. And the loo- There was a lunar lander-

   7. JFJames Fox1:16:25

      No way.

   8. JVJacques Vallée1:16:25

      ... but it was in California. It wasn't in New Mexico.

   9. JFJames Fox1:16:28

      Egg-shaped craft, okay? It was white. I remember Fravor describing a Tic Tac. I was investigating... When that story broke, I was still working on Socorro. Socorro, he described as an egg. I don't know. Did we have Tic Tacs back in 1964? Maybe we did, maybe we didn't.

   10. JRJoe Rogan1:16:41

       Pretty close.

   11. JFJames Fox1:16:42

       But Tic Tac egg.

   12. JRJoe Rogan1:16:43

       P- pretty close.

   13. JFJames Fox1:16:43

       The police officer who described it-

   14. JRJoe Rogan1:16:44

       Yeah.

   15. JFJames Fox1:16:44

       ... it had no wings, no tail. It had a blue flame, but when it got to 20 feet off the ground, it went completely silent. No exhaust vents, no wings, no tail, had a little insignia on it, which we actually show in the film. And-

   16. JRJoe Rogan1:16:56

       This is supposedly-

   17. JFJames Fox1:16:57

       That's a fake. That's not the real symbol. That's a fake symbol that was, that was, uh... Richard T. Holder got to the site, told Lonnie to put a different symbol because they could quickly identify a- a hoaxer if they were able to. We found the real symbol at the National Archives that was written in Dr. Hynek's own handwriting, which I shared with you, which is an inverted V that say an A. Two lines here and one line across the top. It's an A. It's featured in the movie, so... But that was a fake symbol.

   18. JVJacques Vallée1:17:26

       Hmm.

   19. JFJames Fox1:17:26

       Oh.

   20. JRJoe Rogan1:17:27

       So someone put a f- you put a fake symbol on it just so... to see if people were hoaxing it?

   21. JFJames Fox1:17:31

       Doc... Well, what he did was he- he said to the witness-

   22. JRJoe Rogan1:17:34

       Or they did, rather.

   23. JFJames Fox1:17:35

       They did. The mi- It was a good idea, actually. He said, "Look, um, let's change the symbol. That way, if there's anybody else claims to have seen this thing and they say, 'Yeah, that's the symbol,' we'll be able to quickly identify a hoaxer."

   24. JRJoe Rogan1:17:45

       Oh.

   25. JFJames Fox1:17:45

       So that was- that was the point behind that.

   26. JRJoe Rogan1:17:47

       That's pretty clever.

   27. JFJames Fox1:17:48

       Yeah, it's pretty clever.

   28. JRJoe Rogan1:17:49

       Did these things, the beings, the way he described them, did they have the archetypal alien appearance of very small bodies, large eyes? Did they have all the characteristics that you're hearing from these other...

   29. JFJames Fox1:18:01

       He s- he described them as being small, childlike, and then he s- and then I interviewed the wife. Unfortunately, Lonnie had died before I got to him.

   30. JRJoe Rogan1:18:08

       Mm-hmm.

Episode duration: 3:11:19