Joe Rogan Experience #2288 - Jacques Vallée

Narrator 0:00 (drum music) Joe Rogan podcast, check it out.

Jacques Vallée 0:04 The Joe Rogan Experience.

Joe Rogan 0:06 Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night, all day. (rock music) What up, sir? Very good to see you.

Jacques Vallée 0:15 Good to see you.

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

Jacques Vallée 0:23 I, as you know, I've known him for a long time. Uh...

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

Jacques Vallée 0:28 Uh, I knew him at SRI. Actually I was at Stanford Research Institute before him, um, uh, in one of the very early internet research teams when, uh, there was no internet. It was called the ARPANET. It was a-

Joe Rogan 0:44 Wow.

Jacques Vallée 0:44 ... a network of the advanced research project agency and it was all, you know, computer experiment and so on. It turned into... We had, um, engine number three on the internet at, at SRI.

Joe Rogan 0:58 Wow.

Jacques Vallée 0:58 In California.

Joe Rogan 1:00 Engine number three-

Jacques Vallée 1:00 So it was part of the-

Joe Rogan 1:01 ... on the ARPANET.

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

Joe Rogan 1:30 What year was this?

Jacques Vallée 1:32 Hm?

Joe Rogan 1:32 What year?

Jacques Vallée 1:34 Oh, God. Um, uh, '74.

Joe Rogan 1:42 Wow.

Jacques Vallée 1:42 '73... Yeah. '74, '74.

Joe Rogan 1:44 So the ARPANET was around '74?

Jacques Vallée 1:46 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:47 Wow.

Jacques Vallée 1:47 And, um, the... It was funny because I was in, in my office and the vice president of SRI came in, uh, closed the door, and said, um, "Jacques, uh, you know, you've published some things, uh, controversial under your name on UFOs. Um, and, uh, you haven't lost your scientific reputation which is why you're here working for us at SRI, uh, on, on the ARPANET. But, um, you know, there's a proposal from, uh, Dr. Puthoff and Dr. Targ to do parapsychology research here and we've never done that." And I said, "Well, you know, it's, it's a very valid... I, I think it's a very valid area of research. We should, you know... We're in the kind of institution that should do that." He said, "Well, let me, let me draw something on your whiteboard." And he drew a scale, a horizontal scale. And on, on one side there was a, a, a little square. He said, "This is the most we can expect in terms of funding for research in parapsychology. You know, it's maybe at most a million a year, okay? And here is what I manage, you know, in this division." He drew a huge cube, you know, it said $150 million. "Should we jeopardize the research we do for Xerox and IBM and AT&T and Bank of America and so on, just to do some research on, you know, uh, uh, psychic things?" And I said, "Well, um, you know, the, the re- the reason we, we get all this money from DOD and Bank of America and so on, is that we do the research that they can't do themselves. We do, we do the... You know, we go out and we take risk, and, uh, I think we should, uh, take the same risk with, uh, uh, with Hal Puthoff and Russell Targ because this could be very big. You know, there is a lot of literature on this already and we can bring science into it, and they can bring the science into it, you know?" And he said, um, "Well, there is a meeting of the board of directors of SRI, you know, in two days, and most of them are against it. What do I tell them?" And I said, "Well, I can, you know, I can write up the, the reasons why in science you have to take chances and this is science. I mean, this isn't just engineering." And he said, uh, "Well, um, give me a memo by, by tomorrow at 12:00." So I went home and I, I wrote a two-page memo, which was confidential, I don't, don't think anybody has seen it, for the, for the board, explaining why there was scientific evidence, you know, enough of it so that good research could be done and, uh, I, I, you know... Obviously that, that may have helped in, uh, getting, getting the approval for them to come in. And then after the first year, you know, they were there because, uh, you know, the, the, the money kept coming and the results can... you know, good scientific results came, c- came in, came out of it.

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

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

Joe Rogan 6:28 Without an understanding of a sense that perhaps we're not quite aware of.

Jacques Vallée 6:33 That's right. And that, uh, you know, our physics has been dealing with objects and with atoms and all that. But it's, it's clear in modern physics that there are other things and that the theories we have about the, the different fields in the universe are in conflict with each other, in our relativity and quantum mechanics are in conflict. And-

Joe Rogan 6:59 I was reading something that was... Oh, god. I just, I, I glanced at it quickly and I was running out the door, but I was gonna ask Jamie to pull it up. They, they... There's new research that shows that human beings have the ability to detect the magnetic field the same way that birds do when they fly south and, and other animals they believe do when they navigate terrain. They think that human beings have this ability, but perhaps it's something that we have ignored so long, it's atrophied or it's not something that we use.

Jacques Vallée 7:35 Uh, that, that, that's a question for, um, you know, a, a biologist or a specialist of the brain, although it may not be in, in the brain itself. It may be diffused in, in the organism. Uh, so I'm not really qualified, you know, to-

Joe Rogan 7:52 Well, I was gonna ask Jamie to pull up the article. But the point being that there perhaps are senses that we're either not aware of. Humans, like other animals, may sense Earth's magnetic field. Yeah, this is it.

Jacques Vallée 8:04 The hell?

Joe Rogan 8:04 Okay. This is from a while ago.

Jacques Vallée 8:05 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 8:05 This is from 2019.

Jacques Vallée 8:07 Yes.

Joe Rogan 8:07 Okay.

Jacques Vallée 8:08 How-

Joe Rogan 8:08 This is not the same article, but, uh, it's probably a rehash.

Narrator 8:10 That's what it says. I... There's another similar one here from, like, a month ago that's-

Joe Rogan 8:14 Hmm.

Narrator 8:14 ... the exact same title.

Joe Rogan 8:15 Yes.

Narrator 8:16 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 8:16 That's what I saw. This episode is brought to you by Intuit TurboTax. We're all just trying to level up, right? I'm always trying to push myself, whether it's training, learning something new, or just trying to be a better human. You put in work physically, mentally, and over time, you evolve. It's 2025. Doing your taxes has evolved, too. Just like we put in the work to level up, TurboTax has put in the work to make taxes effortless. Because now, taxes is getting matched up with a TurboTax live expert who has the latest tech. With that, they can cross-check millions of data points to make sure that your return is 100% accurate. That means you get the best possible outcome this tax season for your unique tax situation, all while you go about your day. It's 2025. It's time to file like it. Now, this is taxes Intuit TurboTax. Get an expert now at turbotax.com.

Jacques Vallée 9:17 You know, if, if-

Joe Rogan 9:19 Yeah.

Jacques Vallée 9:19 ... if you look at the history of, uh, the islands in the Pacific, like, I spent some time in Tahiti and I, I looked at their traditions, they were navigating the Pacific fine. They knew where they were going. Now, part of that was navigating with the moon, but part of it was something else. And on every ship, they had one, you know, one, one man who was gifted in guiding with respect... of course, guiding with respect to what the ocean looked like-

Joe Rogan 9:52 Mm-hmm.

Jacques Vallée 9:53 ... and, and to the moon and so on. But also, uh, that's never really been explained. They had an uncanny a- ability to get to the right islands, you know, on the way to their destination.

Joe Rogan 10:09 Hmm.

Jacques Vallée 10:09 And to guide those ships. Otherwise, they would have been, you know... they, they didn't have compasses.

Joe Rogan 10:15 Right.

Jacques Vallée 10:15 And, uh, there, there are books now coming out and certainly, i- I found some of those books in, you know, in, in Tahiti, uh, ab- about the, the, the history of that and the, the research that's been done into those people. Uh, but they were, they were special people. They were (laughs) they, you know, they were gifted.

Joe Rogan 10:39 Hmm.

Jacques Vallée 10:39 Uh, that's not something, you know, that I could do.

Joe Rogan 10:43 Have you, um, heard or listened to the Telepathy Tapes?

Jacques Vallée 10:48 The what, what?

Joe Rogan 10:48 The Telepathy Tapes. Are you aware of this?

Jacques Vallée 10:51 Uh, v- vaguely. I'm not-

Joe Rogan 10:52 It's a podcast that's about non-verbal autistic kids that demonstrate psychic ability. Um, provable, they've got d- dozens of these cases on video where people in other rooms are looking at objects. The child, completely locked off, can't see them at all. Will say and write down what those objects are, colors, numbers, and sequence, and very accurately. And so, they believe that this is something that... Well, many of these parents have talked about it in the past, but felt foolish, felt like it was something that they would be ridiculed about, and so they didn't want to talk about it openly. But once they started gathering up information, they got more people to open up about this, then they start documenting it. And s- they start coming up with ways to make sure that there couldn't be a, any possible way they could be communicating with each other. And, uh, it's just utterly fascinating, because they're showing-

Jacques Vallée 11:48 Yes.

Joe Rogan 11:48 ... that there is something going on. There's some way of transferring information back and forth, including some of these teachers have figured out a way to not just receive, but also transmit the same way these children have. So, people that aren't non-verbal and they aren't, they, they aren't autistic-... the, these people are able to do it as well. They've been able to create a bond with these children and communicate with them.

Jacques Vallée 12:11 And there are companies in, uh, Silicon Valley that, uh, you know, are heavily involved in, in, a- advanced, um, processing and advance, uh, uh, programming, specifically recruiting, uh, young men, uh, and women with that kind of talent. One, one of my ... I have three grandsons that I love and one of them is, uh, uh, uh, it's not clear, you know, whether he's actually autistic in the current definition, but he certainly has some of that, you know, some of those indications of-

Joe Rogan 12:46 Some sort of a gift.

Jacques Vallée 12:47 ... yeah, of, of thinking and getting information in, in ways that are very different from the... Now, it may be that in evolution, uh, the, the reason, you know, uh, sort of "lower animals" can do it and we cannot, uh, is that we've developed other ways of getting information-

Joe Rogan 13:07 Right.

Jacques Vallée 13:08 ... that are more reliable in the long run or, you know. So it, uh, uh, it may be just one of the dormant, you know, abilities that we have that most of us don't, you know, don't develop and-

Joe Rogan 13:22 Right.

Jacques Vallée 13:22 ... we're not encouraged to grow it in school because it's, you know, disturbing for the rest of the class and so on, if, uh ...

Joe Rogan 13:30 And perhaps it's something that people had before language, and language and then written language and then, of course, media sort of eroded those abilities.

Jacques Vallée 13:42 Yes. Uh, and you find that, uh, uh, also in South America, uh, and, and in Australia, you know, and in Australia and New Zealand, uh, uh-

Joe Rogan 13:54 In the indigenous people?

Jacques Vallée 13:55 ... uh, uh, yes.

Joe Rogan 13:56 Yeah.

Jacques Vallée 13:56 Uh, uh, natives, but, you know, uh, up, up to the current population.

Joe Rogan 14:01 Hmm. Right. And... So perhaps it's something that we all had and we've lost it. Now, when you were initially studying parapsychology, what, what were the protocols that you were using? Like, how were you trying to deter- determine whether or not people were capable?

Jacques Vallée 14:18 So, um, uh, uh, you know, a- again, uh, in, in my own ab- I've studied parapsychology more as a, you know, as a personal interest. But, uh, um, Dr. Puthoff and Dr. Targ were doing it as, with scientific controls.

Joe Rogan 14:39 Yes.

Jacques Vallée 14:39 I mean, that was the point, uh, that to, to look at it from a physics point of view, you know, not just from a parapsychology or, or psychology point of view. So they were designing tests that were, um, more tied to physical quantities. And one of the people that they brought in was Ingo Swann, who was an, an artist from New York. He was very uncomfortable with California. The sky is always blue, you know, it's boring and so on.

Joe Rogan 15:13 (laughs)

Jacques Vallée 15:13 And he, he liked New York. He liked the, the, the animation of the city and his friends and so on. But, uh, I knew, of course, of, of him. I had read some of the things he... So when he came to SRI, he, he told me, um, that, you know, uh, remote viewing is one thing, or parapsychology, but it should be applied to science and also, you know, it, it had to be applied to, um, intelligence in the sense of, you know, the, the, the intelligence agencies were funding SRI to do this, okay?

Joe Rogan 15:53 Hmm.

Jacques Vallée 15:54 Uh, the three-letter, you know, agencies. There were a number of them who were very interested, uh, because they knew that gift existed, you know, in pilots and in n- number of people. And-

Joe Rogan 16:06 And so they were trying to figure out a way to utilize this for military applications?

Jacques Vallée 16:10 Um, mostly to look at developments in the Soviet Union at that point.

Joe Rogan 16:15 Oh, so they were trying-

Jacques Vallée 16:16 But, but also, you know, lost spacecraft. They found this lost spacecraft in the middle of a jungle in Africa and so on by-

Joe Rogan 16:25 Lost spacecraft?

Jacques Vallée 16:25 ... by parapsychology.

Joe Rogan 16:26 Whose spacecraft? Ours?

Jacques Vallée 16:28 Um, n- no. It was Russian.

Joe Rogan 16:31 Uh, they, so they found it through, like, remote viewing?

Jacques Vallée 16:35 Yes.

Joe Rogan 16:36 Really?

Jacques Vallée 16:36 So, uh, when, um, uh, uh, so Ingo was starting to go around the labs at SRI. He wanted to, he was... He had never been in a scientific institution where it's full of computers and gadgets and measuring instruments and everything else. So he wanted to know... uh, uh, he saw that as the next domain where parapsychology could be applied in a straight, scientific, rational way. So he wa- I was one of the people that he wanted to talk to. And I, I, I told him, "Do, do you know how a computer finds data?" You know, you have a computer, a machine full of, you know, chips. How does it deal with the real world? And he said, "I have no idea. I mean, I've never looked inside a computer." And I said, "Well, there's three ways. You know, as a programmer, I can declare, uh, uh, a variable. I can say X is always going to be 3.14, okay? Or pi. Uh, but in many cases, I can give you the address of the place where I've put the data that is going to be different. The address is going to be the same, but the data is going to change every time. So, but I can give you the address. It's, uh, 23-14. 23-14 is where I'm going to put, you know, the age of the patient."... okay? But it's going to be different with every patient. So that's, uh, dir- direct a- addressing, uh, that I can also put in that location, I can put the address of somewhere else, which I'm going to compute in my program and that's indirect addressing. And then there is a rest of the world, which is too big to put inside a machine and the machine has a memory, maybe very big, but it's still limited. So it's going to go get the information from some memory device somewhere else, you know, maybe the World Bank and, uh, or the Library of Congress. And there, I cannot give you the address, but I can give you, um, a, a sort of imaginary process by which you can derive the address when you get there and bring it into the memory of your computer and then work with it. And, um, he said, "You know, that's it. That's, that's what I need." And then he came up with the, the, the idea of coordinate remote viewing out of that conversation I had with him, okay? So that was my contribution to the, the actual project at the beginning and then he thought the... as an address, he was going to take coordinates, longitude and latitude, because they were... we were going to look at... they were going to... I wasn't officially part of the, uh, but I was, you know, I had passed the qualifications to be at SRI in a Department of Defense project. So I, I, I was one of the good guys. So we, uh, we had many conversation with coffee and so on in the lab with, uh, with Ingo and later with Uri Geller that were absolutely fascinating to me, so I, I tried to... In some cases, I, they, they needed to talk to someone who knew technology and was interested in this even though I wasn't, you know, uh, uh, on the project itself. But somebody who was inside, you know, so that they didn't... the information didn't get, get out into the real world until they were ready to actually publish it, because everybody wanted to kill their project. I mean, there were so many skeptics saying, you know, "This can't work. They are making it up." Uh-

Joe Rogan 20:49 Right.

Jacques Vallée 20:49 They are fooled by a prestidigitator. You know, Uri Geller is a magician and all those things.

Joe Rogan 20:55 Right, right.

Jacques Vallée 20:55 Well, he is a magician. (laughs) But, but he's also, you know, a, a, an extraordinary psychic.

Joe Rogan 21:03 So, so could you explain, um, so they're looking for this Russian spacecraft, so w- how do they... what's the environment in which they remote view? How do they set this up?

Jacques Vallée 21:15 So, um, Ingo, um, after the project was pretty much over, there, there was some continuous studies and Ingo brought me back to work with him, uh, because he wanted to write a book, uh, that would be a synthesis of his methodology, you know, to answer your question-

Joe Rogan 21:41 Okay.

Jacques Vallée 21:41 ... of how do you do this. And he had a very structured way of, of, um, of doing that with a number of, of... Uh, what he wanted to do was train people to do that, hopefully to his level, okay? Um, so it was step-by-step, so there was a first... Y- you had a pad of paper, you know, and a pen, and he was sitting at the end there. The table was about like this, you know, except there was nothing on it and in a, a room that had nothing on the walls, no windows. There was a chair here and a chair there, so he was away from me. I couldn't see what he was reading. He had a stack of targets that were places on the Earth and, I mean, obviously, the, the idea was to look at what was going on in, you know, Vladivostok or in, you know, some cor-

Joe Rogan 22:39 When you say a stack of targets, can, can you explain, like is it a map? Is he... is it just coordinates?

Jacques Vallée 22:45 It was just coordinates.

Joe Rogan 22:46 Just numbers?

Jacques Vallée 22:47 He had gotten the maps and those were test things from, you know, uh, geographic features on the Earth, cities, mountains...

Joe Rogan 22:57 Mm-hmm. Got it.

Jacques Vallée 22:58 ... and so on. So, um, he would read out the coordinates and I had a pad of, of paper and a number two pencil, so everything was very coded, you know, very strict. And I would draw something that he called an ideogram. So it could be like this, you know, it could be a curve, it could be... And then just first impression. Uh, his theory, which I, I think, you know, having experienced it, uh, we, we did that for a year. Now I had a job somewhere else, but I was coming two, two mornings a week, you know, to work with him. This was classified, so the, the, other people at SRI had no idea what was going on in that room that was dedicated to his work. Um, and the, um... He would read out the... His idea was that y- the... we can all get that signal, you know, there is a signal. If I give you a s- a longitude and a latitude, you-... potentially can describe what's there; if it's a city, if it's a mountain, if it's, uh, uh, some place in the country. Uh, the reason you cannot is when the signal is overwhelming, the signal is extraordinarily large, much larger than we can hold it in our brains. So, the people who do that have a way of processing the signal and recalling it, and that's the secret. That's what's, uh, that's the main thing, to me, that's come out of the SRI study, among many things. But so, he, his idea was you have to stop the signal, you have to catch it. And it's going to be very, very fast and most people just go on with their life. You know, they just, it's just a passing thing. And, but you can recall the signal. So, he would read out the coordinates again. And now, my, my little scribble is going to turn into maybe a series of waves and then, you know, a city with skyscrapers after, if we do that a number of ways. Now, there are a lot of, of errors that can come in and then we can, we can think we recognize it and try to name it. That's the thing you can't, you shouldn't do. You shouldn't try to name it because to name it, put it in the other half of the brain, which is logical and rational and, you know. So, uh, the idea is to label that as an error, you know, it's not a city by the, by the bay, it's something else so we go on and we keep just going on. So, you have to do that with a very patient guide, you know, to train yourself to do that. And SRI, you know, uh, Hal and, and, uh, Ingo did, did that, you know, very well in training a cadre of people who could be almost, not quite, but almost as good as Ingo, and there were a couple who were as good, as good as he was. One time, now I, I said, "But Ingo, you know I'm not psychic." He said, "Well, you know, think about that because

Jacques Vallée 26:29 you've shown evidence of having, of understanding the process." You know, there are some things that I did that, that would be classified as, as psychic, but I cannot do it-

Joe Rogan 26:43 What kind of things?

Jacques Vallée 26:43 ... I cannot control it.

Joe Rogan 26:44 Right, it just happens randomly.

Jacques Vallée 26:46 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 26:46 What kind of like, what kind, what kind of things?

Jacques Vallée 26:48 Well, one time I, I get there 8:30 in the morning, we close the door, um, and he gave, gives me a set of coordinates, longitude and latitude somewhere. And I get very cold right away and I get dizzy. You know, I mean, I'm, I, I, you know, I have to grab the table and I, I'm not drawing anything and Ingo says, "Jacques, what's wrong?" And, and I said, "Ingo, I don't know where you're sending me but I'm cold, I'm trembling, I'm afraid. I'm afraid of falling and, uh, you know, I really don't, don't feel well." And he said, "You're on top of a peak in the Andes."

Joe Rogan 27:34 Whoa. (laughs)

Jacques Vallée 27:36 So, he pulls out the, he pulls out the thing and gives it, gives it to me that comes from, um, you know, a, a photograph of, uh, of the Andes taken from an airplane with this, this peak. And they computed the coordinates of, uh, of the peak and that's what he was giving me. And I was there.

Joe Rogan 27:58 You felt it physically. Did you see it or did you feel it?

Jacques Vallée 28:00 No. Uh, it was just a physiological reaction on my whole body. I was trembling-

Joe Rogan 28:05 Exactly as if you were on-

Jacques Vallée 28:07 ... I was freezing cold-

Joe Rogan 28:07 ... a peak.

Jacques Vallée 28:08 ... and I was very afraid of falling.

Joe Rogan 28:10 Wow.

Jacques Vallée 28:11 I was falling. And, um-

Joe Rogan 28:14 Had you had any of these that didn't work? Did they try any coordinate-

Jacques Vallée 28:18 Oh, yeah, yes, sure.

Joe Rogan 28:19 How-

Jacques Vallée 28:19 I'm not, uh, you know, you should not use me as a, uh, remote viewer to launch a, you know-

Joe Rogan 28:26 (laughs)

Jacques Vallée 28:26 ... a tomahawk, uh, over, (laughs) over somewhere. No.

Joe Rogan 28:31 And so, it was-

Jacques Vallée 28:32 That's a problem that, of course, the army has, you know.

Joe Rogan 28:34 Yes.

Jacques Vallée 28:35 Is it good enough so we can launch a rocket-

Joe Rogan 28:37 Right.

Jacques Vallée 28:38 ... to destroy that thing?

Joe Rogan 28:39 Right.

Jacques Vallée 28:40 Uh, they-

Joe Rogan 28:40 Who is the best at it? Who's the best at remote? Is there one person that's consistently accurate?

Jacques Vallée 28:46 There are a couple and they, they are not, uh, uh, you know, Ingo was known because he wrote about it and so on. Uh, many of them, uh, Joe McMoneagle, uh, is, uh, probably the, the, the best one alive today. Uh, he described, um, a structure and he described a ship that was being built by the Russians, which was a super submarine in a hangar somewhere. And the Navy just laughed at him. They said, "That's crazy. Don't you, uh, it's in a hangar, uh, away from the sea, so why would you build a ship, you know, when you don't have the ocean?" Well, it turned out he was right and it was a super class, uh, new Soviet submarine. He described the inside of the building which had no windows and so on. Uh, and yeah, I mean, from a satellite they could see the building, but they couldn't see inside the building. He described what was inside the building, he described the submarine, he described the, the length and the, you know, he actually-... measured it psychically and that turned out to be right.

Joe Rogan 30:09 Whoa.

Jacques Vallée 30:09 And then when the submarine was built, they brought some bulldozers and they dug (laughs) , you know, a channel to the sea and off it went.

Joe Rogan 30:18 This episode is brought to you by BetterHelp. Being independent is good, but you should never be afraid to ask for help when you need it. After all, we're only human. We can't know everything. That's why it's crucial to have a support system, people you can go to when it gets rough. Think of friends, family members, your partner, hell, even your dog. When you're feeling down, spending time with a furry friend can be a good pick-me-up. But I get it, sometimes you don't want to or can't go to them for help. For these moments, try therapy. It can be a good source of support in any area of your life, whether you're working on personal relationships, job stress, or something else. Therapy can teach you a multitude of different things to help you be your best self, like how to set boundaries, when to let go of toxic relationships, and what to do when you feel overwhelmed. And even more importantly, you can do it in a safe space. If you think therapy might be a good option for you, a good place to start is BetterHelp. They have a diverse network of therapists and everything is online, which can be very convenient if you need a last-minute session. It's also very easy to switch therapists if it's not working out. Build your support system with BetterHelp. Visit betterhelp.com/jre to get 10% off your first month. That's BetterHelp, H-E-L-P, .com/jre.

Jacques Vallée 31:45 So I-

Joe Rogan 31:46 I had heard about this.

Jacques Vallée 31:46 ... I mean, tho- those things were extraordinary and, uh-

Joe Rogan 31:49 Yeah. I had heard about this, but I didn't know it was that accurate.

Jacques Vallée 31:54 Y- yeah. That, that happened. And he was, um, a- as opposed to, uh, you know, one of us, he was, uh, he was right, you know, enough of the time that you could rely on what he was describing. And also, they came up with a way of measuring, actually quantifying the value of your perception, you know. So I- I- I told Ingo-

Joe Rogan 32:21 How could they do that?

Jacques Vallée 32:21 ... you know, "Let's do another one," because I'm on a roll here, you know-

Joe Rogan 32:25 Yeah. (laughs)

Jacques Vallée 32:25 ... after the speak in the end is he said, "No, Jacques, you know, you're going home now." I said, "Well, it's nine o'clock. You know, we've only been here half an hour. Why are you sending me home? I mean, this is great." You know, "I- I got it."

Joe Rogan 32:40 Right.

Jacques Vallée 32:40 He said, "Yeah, you got it. You- y- you don't need all the levels. I mean, you got to the top level. You were there." Uh...

Joe Rogan 32:48 Why did he want to send you home?

Jacques Vallée 32:50 Uh, he said, "I want you to stay with that feeling. I don't want to do another one that you'd miss."

Joe Rogan 32:57 Mm-hmm.

Jacques Vallée 32:57 "So, and I- I want you to keep that in mind because you got the whole thing."

Joe Rogan 33:02 Is this based on past experiments and the way they were achieve- achieving results?

Jacques Vallée 33:08 Y- yes.

Joe Rogan 33:08 So he didn't want to bombard you with it.

Jacques Vallée 33:09 They were grading every, you know, every test subject and-

Joe Rogan 33:13 Right.

Jacques Vallée 33:13 ... so on and...

Joe Rogan 33:13 So he didn't want to give you another experience. He wanted you to take that experience and just-

Jacques Vallée 33:18 And-

Joe Rogan 33:18 ... sit with it.

Jacques Vallée 33:18 ... and- uh, keep the experience with me-

Joe Rogan 33:20 Yes.

Jacques Vallée 33:20 ... during the day and because I got the whole signal.

Joe Rogan 33:24 Right.

Jacques Vallée 33:25 But-

Joe Rogan 33:25 And- and did you feel like that if you did that, it would aid you in your ability to do it in the future?

Jacques Vallée 33:30 Uh, yeah, it would, um... Y- yes, I- I would lose that sense of, um, uh, direct, direct access to something that bypasses your brain. You know, I- I'm basically, you know, I was trained in mathematics and physics and astronomy, so my, uh, I- I use the part of my brain that's analytical, you know, and I'm a good programmer, computer programmer and so on. Uh, this is not, this is very different. This is grabbing a signal which has everything in it-

Joe Rogan 34:07 Mm-hmm.

Jacques Vallée 34:07 ... you know, and being able to s- to, to catch it very fast and just get a little bit of information and then catch it again, recall it, you know, that's what we were doing that, you know, five times, six times, 10 times, until making sure that you don't try to name it, you don't try to, um, put, you know, a description on top of it. It just stay with the signal.

Joe Rogan 34:36 Right.

Jacques Vallée 34:36 And that, I think that's an a- amazing contribution from what Dr. Puthoff and Targ and some of their subjects did.

Joe Rogan 34:46 Was there a specifical- a specific way that you achieved a state of mind that made you more able to perceive these coordinates or perceive re- whatever you're- what signal you're getting from remote viewing?

Jacques Vallée 35:02 There was, uh, uh, I had a lot of admiration and love for Ingo, for what he was capable of doing and, you know, his, his art and his personality and so on. Uh, he was, you know, very much admired in the whole, the whole team. Um, and, and here, I think it was the, the structure also of the experiment, you know, I- I- I trusted what he was trying to teach me. I've always-

Joe Rogan 35:35 So you were open to it.

Jacques Vallée 35:37 Yes.

Joe Rogan 35:37 You trusted it, so you were open to it.

Jacques Vallée 35:39 I- I had, you know, both the, the admiration and the trust for-

Joe Rogan 35:43 Did he ask you to put your mind in a specific place? Did you... Was there, was there a way of counting yourself into-

Jacques Vallée 35:50 No. The idea is not to put my mind into it, you know.

Joe Rogan 35:53 Hm.

Jacques Vallée 35:54 Just to let it-

Joe Rogan 35:55 Just let it come. Just be empty.

Jacques Vallée 35:56 Because my mind is analytical.

Joe Rogan 35:58 Right. Of course.

Jacques Vallée 36:00 And, um, you know, I've a- I was always, mm, very good in math, uh, and, um, y- you know, I mean, you have to be if you're going to be an astronomer.

Joe Rogan 36:14 Mm-hmm.

Jacques Vallée 36:14 And, uh, I...... so I can be very structured and so on. This is not structured. This is boom. Uh, and then, then you can begin to analyze it but you have to analyze it keeping your, your rational mind, you know, a-a-away from...

Joe Rogan 36:35 So you just have to let the information come to you somehow or another and not try to imagine the information or create the information-

Jacques Vallée 36:42 Not to project what it is.

Joe Rogan 36:44 ... or perceive it, right. Just let it happen to you. And so you had seen him do this. And so you, and you knew that this was a valid field of research so you were just open to it and you just sat down there and tried to let it happen to you. Did it happen any other time that was... that resembled the Andes peaks? Where that, you have that overwhelming feeling of cold and falling? Did you have-

Jacques Vallée 37:11 Uh...

Joe Rogan 37:11 ... that feeling with anything else?

Jacques Vallée 37:13 Yes. I, I had some of that but this one was, you know, just completely shocking because it was... And, uh, I think that's a, a characteristic of when you really get it, you know.

Joe Rogan 37:28 Right.

Jacques Vallée 37:29 There is no question. And you know in the movie, Patton.

Joe Rogan 37:35 Yes.

Jacques Vallée 37:35 Patton is sent to North Africa because to fight Rommel. Rommel is there with his tanks and the American army is going to... is, isn't ready to invade Europe but wants to, to start, you know, uh, controlling the, the Germans in North Africa. He's sent there. He lands. There is a, you know, a, a lieutenant there with a Jeep that takes him to the place where there was, there was a, a battle and the, the Americans were decimated, you know, by Rommel, who was just a genius, you know, German general. Uh, great with tanks just like he w-... Uh, Pa- Patton considered him as his major, you know, enemy because both of them understood tanks. And, uh, so, uh, Patton gets in the Jeep. That's in the movie. It's just absolutely perfect. I've checked that. This was his- historical, you know, exact in the movie. They, uh, they drive to the site of the battle and they get to, in, in the desert in the Jeep, and they get to a fork in the road and they, the, you know, the driver takes to the left. And Patton said, uh, "Son, you know, why don't we go to the right? Because that's where the battle was." And the, uh, the driver says, "Uh, sir, uh, you know, with all due respect, I mean, I, I was there (laughs) when that battle is on the left." He said, "Trust me, go to the right." And they go to the right and they get to the edge of a plateau where you see a big plain and Patton says, "This is where the battle was when Hannibal came from the left with his elephants." You know? And the, the, the battle was there, you know, in the... And, and I wa- I had been there. I was there. Patton thought that in his... he was reincarnated from a, a Roman, uh, general who had been at that battle against Hannibal and his elephants. And, you know, the poor driver (laughs) saying, you know, "How, how did this happen?" You know? "How did I get here with, with this general who thinks he's reincarnated, you know, who fought against Hannibal?" And, uh, um, they... I've worked with people, as, as you know. I've run a number of venture capital fee- uh, funds, uh, with people who had that kind of intuition, you know? And you think, you think finance is driven by greed and so on but at some level, greed doesn't really matter, you know? It's, it's getting to the truth of something, especially in venture capital, where you're going to change the way things are done, you know, with these, these gadgets, with computers, with, uh, you know, uh, rockets and so on. Uh, you're going to go to a new generation of things. So it hasn't been done before. And the, the, the, the financial people, uh, you've got 10 engineers in front of you who can do it. There is one who will succeed and nine who's going to fail. And you have to pick, you have to pick the, the, the thinking that's going to succeed, you know? I mean, it's not... It's not the money and it's not the technology. It's the mind of the driver who'll, who'll say, "No, let's go to the right. Let's not go to the left." You know? I mean, Patton was extraordinary in, in that, I mean, he was a remote viewer.

Joe Rogan 41:41 Hmm.

Jacques Vallée 41:42 And he demonstrated that again and again. You know, uh, there are some interesting books that I've collected from some of the, some of his lieutenants, you know, who...

Joe Rogan 41:52 You would also have to consider, that's an extraordinary state of mind to be a general in a world war and the consequences of everything you do and what is at stake in this war is... Got to be a state of mind that's-

Jacques Vallée 42:08 Yes.

Joe Rogan 42:08 ... very, very unusual with so many consequences and so much pressure that it probably makes some signals more clear if you have that ability to perceive them because you are... you must be in a heightened state-... of awareness-

Jacques Vallée 42:24 Yes.

Joe Rogan 42:24 ... because just of the consequences of your life.

Jacques Vallée 42:27 That's, exactly. But you, you also have to be detached. I mean, he, you know, e- eventually he's going to go to the battlefield where the, you know, the, uh, bodies of-

Joe Rogan 42:39 Mm-hmm.

Jacques Vallée 42:39 ... soldiers who have been killed or burning tanks and everything else. They show that in the movie. I mean-

Joe Rogan 42:45 Right.

Jacques Vallée 42:45 ... that's where he's supposed to go.

Joe Rogan 42:48 Yeah.

Jacques Vallée 42:48 But, y- you know, his, his mind is at a different level.

Joe Rogan 42:54 Hmm.

Jacques Vallée 42:54 Uh, and-

Joe Rogan 42:56 When did they first start researching this? And when did they believe that this was, uh, an ability that some people had?

Jacques Vallée 43:04 Oh, uh, you know, way back in antiquity.

Joe Rogan 43:08 Really?

Jacques Vallée 43:09 Yeah. Uh, and, you know, they, they had, um, seers that, uh, the, the, the, the king would go consult, uh, uh, whether he, um, uh, he should engage in, in a war with-

Joe Rogan 43:31 Right.

Jacques Vallée 43:31 ... uh, you know, they had... The, the Greeks had the Pythia, you know, who was, um, a, a woman who... They, they had an, an area, a volcanic area where there were fumes coming out of the earth, you know, that was supposed to be one of the doors to the underworld and so on. And there was a, a special, uh, cult around that, that place. And, uh, you know, the, the, the, the, the king would, uh, would go there before great decision and, and would, would ask the message from, you know, the, the underworld or the message from the, from the mind of the, the woman who was interpreting what was coming from the earth. So, th- that has been, you know, regarded as, um, uh... You know, um, Hitler, Adolf Hitler, uh, was, uh, in, in his... Ear- before the war, you know, as, uh, when he got to be the leader of, uh, of Germany, he, he exhibited and he very much believed in those, th- those powers. I, I think he got to the point where he trusted it too much (laughs) .

Joe Rogan 44:54 Yeah.

Jacques Vallée 44:54 And started making mistakes, and that could be used against him. Because the ego-

Joe Rogan 44:59 Well, he was also doing a lot of drugs.

Jacques Vallée 44:59 You know, you have to-

Joe Rogan 45:00 Yeah.

Jacques Vallée 45:00 ... get the ego out of the way.

Joe Rogan 45:02 Right.

Jacques Vallée 45:02 And, of course, that's the hardest thing, you know, for, for us to do.

Joe Rogan 45:06 Especially to a narcissist dictator who's on drugs.

Jacques Vallée 45:09 That's right. (laughs)

Joe Rogan 45:11 (laughs) Yeah.

Jacques Vallée 45:13 That's right. That's right.

Joe Rogan 45:13 Well, that, that's the always, the age-old problem with seers. Like, how do you know who's a charlatan and who's real? Because there's always a bunch of fake psychics. There's fake palm readers, fake tarot card readers, people that are just con artists, that are just trying to swindle people out of money. But that doesn't discount the possibility that some people have these bizarre abilities. And that is something that people have sort of recognized forever, but it's always been dismissed, especially in this modern-day reductionist culture that likes to only look at things that are, you know, tried, true, proven, agreed upon, you know, and then trust the science. Like, this, this concept that-

Jacques Vallée 46:00 Well, I think, as... You know, uh, in science, I mean, the burden is on you as a scientist to come up with an experiment that will discriminate between the random things-

Joe Rogan 46:13 Right.

Jacques Vallée 46:13 ... and, and, you know, will give you, will give you s- guides to, you know-

Joe Rogan 46:19 But I think that's what they've done with The Telepathy Tapes, and I'm hoping, uh, the success of this and then they're gonna do a whole series on it, where they're doing a documentary and they're showing all the footage. So you, you're gonna be able to see it for yourself. And I'm, I'm, I'm hoping that this stops the ridicule, because there's a bunch of scientists when... And I think this is with the UAP topic as well, uh, the UFO topic as well. I think, um, there's a bunch of people that don't want to consider it because there's too much bullshit out there, and there's too much of a possibility that you could look like a fool. And to a very respected scientist whose research is very important, as we were talking about with, with the IBM thing, where there's hundreds of millions of dollars that are dedicated towards these, why would you risk all that and the credibility of all that on this nonsense about people seeing things with their brain in a closed room, finding coordinates, pretending they're on top of a mountain, all that kind of stuff?

Jacques Vallée 47:19 Well, f- fortunately, you know, certainly in, you know, in California, uh, there are people who can take risk, you know, uh, and, and, and put a few million dollars behind-

Joe Rogan 47:35 Yeah.

Jacques Vallée 47:35 ... behind, uh, behind something.

Joe Rogan 47:37 Shout out to Stanford.

Jacques Vallée 47:39 Uh... Yep.

Joe Rogan 47:39 Yeah.

Jacques Vallée 47:40 And, and, uh, you know, as you know, I come from France, and in, in France, uh, it's very, very hard to do that, you know, because, uh, the system is very structured-

Joe Rogan 47:50 Mm-hmm.

Jacques Vallée 47:50 ... and very conventional and so on.

Joe Rogan 47:52 Right.

Jacques Vallée 47:52 Even though France has had some of the brightest people in, in that kind of research.

Joe Rogan 47:57 So it's just a cultural limitation of the culture?

Jacques Vallée 48:00 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 48:00 It's... Yeah.

Jacques Vallée 48:01 Uh, it's, you know, sort of everything has to be rational.

Joe Rogan 48:04 Mm-hmm.

Jacques Vallée 48:04 Because-

Joe Rogan 48:05 Yeah. America's a little more chaotic.

Jacques Vallée 48:08 And they also... A- as, as you know, France has had, for a long time, has had a, a project on UFOs, official project, uh, and, uh, that takes reports from the public, and they investigate them. And they... It's a very small team, but they have access to all the resources of French research, so they can...... you know, they can get the weather people, they can get the, you know, the air force, they can get the radar people. They can get all of that. So they can tap into the resources of a lot of different departments of, of the government.

Joe Rogan 48:45 Hmm.

Jacques Vallée 48:46 So, it's, it's, it's very powerful. So, they, uh, they will explain, they find a rational explanation for about 95% of all the reports.

Joe Rogan 48:57 Hmm.

Jacques Vallée 48:58 Which is true. I, I agree with that. You know, I've been there and, uh...

Joe Rogan 49:02 So it's about 95%-

Jacques Vallée 49:04 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 49:04 ... you can explain away?

Jacques Vallée 49:05 Uh, it's not hoaxes. Uh, those are-

Joe Rogan 49:07 Right.

Jacques Vallée 49:07 ... you, you know, people who really think that they've seen something unusual.

Joe Rogan 49:12 Right.

Jacques Vallée 49:13 But what they... what was unusual to them may have been the moon rising through the fog and it looks like an elongated disc. And, and then after a while, it's, uh, uh, things change and so on. And they-

Joe Rogan 49:27 Ball lightning.

Jacques Vallée 49:28 You know?

Joe Rogan 49:28 Yeah, there's a few things.

Jacques Vallée 49:29 They, they really think they've seen a flying saucer coming over.

Joe Rogan 49:33 Mm-hmm.

Jacques Vallée 49:33 Or they, uh, th- there are about 200 or 250 possible physical things which would... that really could surprise you. You know, that are unusual, that would create conditions under which a normal person would think that they are in the presence of a, a UFO. Then, you know, the, the, what's interesting is the other 5%.

Joe Rogan 49:58 Yes.

Jacques Vallée 49:58 The other 5% is in your face. Uh, you know, I have, um, reports of, uh, something that moved like the Tic Tac, you know, from the, the French Air Force in the '50s.

Joe Rogan 50:13 Mm-hmm.

Jacques Vallée 50:13 There was a, a, a French jet over Morocco that was flying and there was a, a radar tracking the jet. And I, I had the, the reports from the French Air Force with the chart. And that the thing, uh, he was chasing went up, you know, all in a fraction of a second, went to the top of the atmosphere, you know, just like the, the Nimitz case. So those things are not new. I mean, they've... they are in the files if you take the trouble to look at the files.

Joe Rogan 50:46 And they're in the files far back enough in history that it's impossible to imagine human technology achieving these things.

Jacques Vallée 50:53 A- absolutely.

Joe Rogan 50:55 Yeah.

Jacques Vallée 50:55 Well, especially in the '50s. I mean-

Joe Rogan 50:56 Right. Well, the Kenneth Arnold case-

Jacques Vallée 50:58 ... they didn't have anything that had gone into space.

Joe Rogan 51:00 Yeah. There's, there's a bunch of cases that rule out the possibility of human technology when you're talking about people using propeller planes and, and seeing these things.

Jacques Vallée 51:11 Oh, yes.

Joe Rogan 51:11 W- we were at a time technologically where it's not possible to imagine that someone had gone that far beyond us. Now we are in that time where you see things, you go, "Well, how much of that is some sort of top secret government program, some military program, and they have drones that can move at extraordinary speeds with some, uh, undisclosed propulsion system?" That's possible today, at least theoretically. It's, it's, um... you know, we, we entertain those ideas. But back then, this is one, one of the most

Joe Rogan 51:41 fascinating things. I, I told you last night that I consumed three of your books in the last six months. And, um, the, the, the... there was this, this series of three that you did that had a bunch of different encounters. Uh, not just... so right now I'm on The Invisible College, but the last ones that I read were, um, the ones on various contacts that people have had and the-

Jacques Vallée 52:04 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 52:04 ... similarity of these stories. And they go way back, way back, way back before it was sort of a cultural artifact. Like, right now, I think in people's minds, the gray aliens are so iconic, a flying saucer like that, the... that's a copy of, uh, the-

Jacques Vallée 52:22 Yep.

Joe Rogan 52:22 ... sport model from Bob Lazar's adventures. The, these things are i- in pop culture to the point where you almost would expect to see them. You know, you look for them. You... i- if you see something, you could imagine, that you could d- twist it up in your mind and make it like that. But the problem is these stories go way before that. They're, they're too similar. They go a long, long way back and there's too many that are, uh, very, very similar to what we're talking about today, to the point where a rational person would have to say, "Maybe there's something more to this." What do you got there?

Jacques Vallée 53:05 Yeah, I, I brought you this. Uh, it's a token. It's not a coin, it's a token from Burgundy in France, from the, you know, the... a few centuries ago. The, the Duke of, um, Burgundy was under attack. There was a lot of, uh, uh, turmoil in French politics and the king was fighting the, the, the, the, the noble, uh, the, the great nobility and so on was in, in cahoots to get rid of the king and so on. And they were going to be attacked and he needed money to raise an army and he appealed to, uh, people in Burgundy to send him money. And, uh, this was a token that, uh, that they would... the, the, the, the, the king, the, uh, the duke, you know, would give people who had given him money to raise this army. And o- on, on the face of it is this disc.

Joe Rogan 54:10 Yeah.

Jacques Vallée 54:11 That's holding up... um, that's protecting the land from forces above. You know, there are all these arrows raining down on the land and the land is protected by this flying disc. So it, it doesn't mean that they had seen a flying saucer in... at, at that time. But the idea has always been there of, uh, you know-... disc-like objects that were, that were not meteors, that were not, you know, all the-

Joe Rogan 54:44 Right.

Jacques Vallée 54:45 ... natural explanation, that, that were real discs. You, you find that in legends, you find that in, you know, in history way, way back.

Joe Rogan 54:53 Jimmy, can you see if you could find an image of this we could show people? You found it? Yeah, that's it.

Jacques Vallée 54:57 Yep. Yes.

Joe Rogan 55:00 Wow.

Jacques Vallée 55:02 And, uh, you see, it's, it's protecting the land, uh, and it's hovering in the sky, uh, protecting it from all the thunder clouds above. Well, you know, there were a few of those things in, in history. And, you know, I've, I've... as you know, I've collected those with... I have-

Joe Rogan 55:23 Couldn't-

Jacques Vallée 55:23 ... with, uh, uh, a group of, uh-

Joe Rogan 55:26 Couldn't that be interpreted as a shield?

Jacques Vallée 55:29 Um, well, it, it is shown as a, as a shield, you know, that's going to stop all those arrows.

Joe Rogan 55:36 Right. But, but that's what they used to stop arrows back then. They used a shield.

Jacques Vallée 55:41 Yes, yes.

Joe Rogan 55:41 So, so doesn't that just make... I mean, th- that doesn't seem to me to be a UFO. It seems to me to be a shield that they would protect...

Jacques Vallée 55:48 Y- y- yes, but it's, it's also, you know, the... it's not exactly the shape of a, a, a... you know, of a, of a shield. Most sh- uh, shields are, you know, more oblong, but some of them are round. But it... the point is, it's hovering in the sky, protecting the land underneath.

Joe Rogan 56:10 Hmm. Okay.

Jacques Vallée 56:12 And, uh-

Joe Rogan 56:14 I think some of the more compelling stuff is, like, the stuff in the ancient Hindu scripts, the, the vimanas and all these different flying crafts that people described. They've always been a thing that people have described.

Jacques Vallée 56:26 And, and w- we've been able to trace it to actual investigations or actual records, because, of course, when people describe something like that, especially if there was some sort of being associated with it-

Joe Rogan 56:42 Yeah.

Jacques Vallée 56:42 ... you know, it could be the devil, it could be-

Joe Rogan 56:44 Right, right.

Jacques Vallée 56:45 So they had to see a priest and confess and, and, you know, and they were in trouble if you reported that thing. Most, most of the time, you'd be in trouble.

Joe Rogan 56:55 Right.

Jacques Vallée 56:56 Because, uh, uh, it couldn't be a normal thing. So-

Joe Rogan 57:00 You'd be a heretic.

Jacques Vallée 57:01 ... today, they just, you know, they just fire you from wherever you work, because-

Joe Rogan 57:06 Yeah, probably.

Jacques Vallée 57:07 ... they say you're crazy.

Joe Rogan 57:07 Or think maybe you're a kook and then stop you-

Jacques Vallée 57:09 At, at least they don't burn you ali- alive anymore.

Joe Rogan 57:12 And, and people... Yeah, that's lucky. Um, but people do, uh, have a fear, a legitimate fear, of being ridiculed and that could stop their ability to be promoted within whatever organization they're in. You don't wanna think, "Oh, there's kooky Bob over there who thinks, uh, the aliens are watching us."

Jacques Vallée 57:29 The, the best cases I get, uh, are from executives in Silicon Valley whose family has seen something or who have seen something, and they've described, you know, uh, uh, frankly, UFOs to me. And, uh-

Joe Rogan 57:47 That's another one.

Narrator 57:47 I guess they used a different coin from a year later.

Jacques Vallée 57:48 ... they cannot publish it.

Joe Rogan 57:50 So, that looks way different.

Jacques Vallée 57:51 That's right.

Joe Rogan 57:52 So that coin is much more compelling, 'cause that looks like something flying in the sky above the city. That doesn't look like a shield at all. And what is that peak at the bottom of it?

Narrator 58:00 Huh? It's the same thing, but whatever it is.

Joe Rogan 58:02 Yeah, that's very different.

Jacques Vallée 58:04 Y- you can tell that-

Joe Rogan 58:05 Much more compelling.

Jacques Vallée 58:05 ... those things have been in the culture.

Joe Rogan 58:08 Yeah.

Jacques Vallée 58:08 You know, but they've-

Joe Rogan 58:08 Now I'm back in, Jamie. Thank you. Now I'm back (laughs) .

Jacques Vallée 58:09 ... sort of repressed in the culture. And, and the anthropologists-

Joe Rogan 58:13 Yeah.

Jacques Vallée 58:13 ... don't want to look at that. You know, they don't want-

Narrator 58:16 Footnote-

Joe Rogan 58:16 But there's, there's a really old painting that, um... like a biblical painting of, uh, these, uh, people that look like they're flying around and, like, seated in these crafts.

Jacques Vallée 58:27 Yes.

Joe Rogan 58:27 They're in the sky. I've never seen any sort of a conventional explanation of what, what is that artist depicting?

Jacques Vallée 58:36 So the... usually, the explanation when you, when you read, uh, what the historians have said, it's, it's supposed to be, you know, some god or some higher level entity that's coming to protect people and so on. But when you look at the detail, I mean, it, it really looks like a machine. It-

Joe Rogan 59:00 Yes.

Jacques Vallée 59:00 ... really looks mechanical.

Joe Rogan 59:01 See if you can find that image, Jamie. You, you know the one I'm talking about, right?

Narrator 59:04 First guess is this one.

Joe Rogan 59:05 Yeah, that's exactly it. Thank you.

Jacques Vallée 59:06 But we, we wanted to-

Joe Rogan 59:07 Like, with... like, the one on the lower right. Well, both of them. But the lower, like, what is that? That looks like a craft. It looks like someone seated in a craft.

Jacques Vallée 59:15 Well, it's, uh... you know, an envoy from God or, uh, uh, an angel who's been sent. But the problem with those is that the painting, you know, it may relate to something that was written in the third century. The painting is a 16th century painting.

Joe Rogan 59:33 Right, right.

Narrator 59:34 Right, right.

Jacques Vallée 59:34 So we, we didn't look at that that much. I mean, it's interesting from a... like the one with the Virgin, with the ... so it, it may be that the, the artist was witness to something and he wanted to memorialize it and he put it in his painting, but it's not tied to the time of the Virgin, you know?

Joe Rogan 59:58 Right, right, right. They just added it in there.

Jacques Vallée 1:00:01 So we can't, uh-

Joe Rogan 1:00:02 What is that supposed to be in the background?

Jacques Vallée 1:00:03 ... so in, in our book, we stayed away from that. We, we wanted to go to records of somebody having actually testified that he saw something or she saw something.

Joe Rogan 1:00:13 Hmm. Right, not just artwork.

Jacques Vallée 1:00:15 Right.

Joe Rogan 1:00:16 Um, but it just is very bizarre that this artwork continually depicts people in crafts. And look, what is that thing? Flying around.

Jacques Vallée 1:00:26 Yes. And, and-

Joe Rogan 1:00:28 Like, what the hell (laughs) ?

Jacques Vallée 1:00:28 ... there is a communication with the man-

Joe Rogan 1:00:31 Who's looking up at it.

Jacques Vallée 1:00:32 He's looking at it, and, and there is a sense of... that he's actually seeing it-

Joe Rogan 1:00:38 Right.

Jacques Vallée 1:00:38 ... and having a sense of what it is.

Joe Rogan 1:00:40 It's like an Easter egg someone put into the painting.

Jacques Vallée 1:00:43 So this may be-

Joe Rogan 1:00:44 Very strange.

Jacques Vallée 1:00:45 ... that the artist sort of, uh, you know, put that in as a, as a side...... of course, you know, the main theme is the virgin and the child.

Joe Rogan 1:00:57 What's that one over there, Jamie, in the second row that says "Inside Ancient"? Yeah, that one. What the hell is that? That's what really freaks me out, is the, uh, paintings on cave walls that look just like greys.

Jacques Vallée 1:01:11 Uh, well, uh-

Joe Rogan 1:01:12 These bizarre paintings of things that just-

Jacques Vallée 1:01:16 Yep.

Joe Rogan 1:01:16 ... look like they are people wearing helmets.

Jacques Vallée 1:01:20 And, uh, s- the most interesting to me come from the Sahara. You know, uh, the, um, I have, I have friends who are anthropologists who worked with the UN in, in, in Africa and so on and, in part, in, in part of the Sahara. And th- th- w- what they w- one theory they have is that the, the, the culture that eventually moved to Egypt came from the Sahara. So I say, "Well, the Sahara is just sand." Well, it's just sand today, but we know that at one time, it was flourishing. There were forests. There was water. In fact, there is water, but it's underground water. It's a large amount of underground water. There was a sea there at one time. And so, uh, there, there probably was an earlier civilization and some of those come from the Tassili. The Tassili is a region in the Sahara where there are a lot of those representations so there were a lot of people living there at one time and they painted that on the rocks.

Joe Rogan 1:02:35 See if you can find some of those, Jamie. Yeah, it d- and you see similar things that indigenous people in Australia have painted, similar thing- it's all over the world.

Jacques Vallée 1:02:47 Yes.

Joe Rogan 1:02:48 In completely separate environments, very similar features on, in these cave paintings.

Jacques Vallée 1:02:56 And, um, well, I th- I think archeologists wouldn't disagree with that. I think they would say, "But the problem is that we don't correlate it." I mean, they didn't write anything.

Joe Rogan 1:03:08 Right.

Jacques Vallée 1:03:09 You know, the, um-

Joe Rogan 1:03:11 It's open to interpretation.

Jacques Vallée 1:03:12 W- w- we don't have a good correlation so we have to keep, keep looking for that. But, but that's, you know, that's fascinating. But in, in our book, we made the rule that number one, uh, we don't want isolated human figures even with, you know, uh, suits and so on. We, we really want a, a device, a flying device. You know, otherwise you have, you know, you could fill 40 books with images of strange creatures.

Joe Rogan 1:03:44 Right.

Jacques Vallée 1:03:44 Um, the, uh, I mean, what are the things that people see, you know, in, uh, um, around the ranch now? You know, in, uh-

Joe Rogan 1:03:54 Skin walker?

Jacques Vallée 1:03:54 ... in Utah-

Joe Rogan 1:03:55 Yes.

Jacques Vallée 1:03:56 ... and in, you know, Arizona-

Joe Rogan 1:03:58 Yeah.

Jacques Vallée 1:03:58 ... and in all of that. So, um, have to be careful, uh, on, on the boundaries of, of those things.

Joe Rogan 1:04:06 Right.

Jacques Vallée 1:04:06 But we, we wanted to get to a place where there was testimony about somebody seeing a, a flying disc that was strange to them in their culture. And remember, in those cultures, those were agricultural cultures. So with people who were used to interpreting the weather, looking at the mo- phases of the moon, looking at the rising time of the sun and all that was important for their, you know, for their agriculture. So they, they, they knew their environment very well, you know, better than we do as, you know, people living in, in cities. So, uh, we, we can take that to some extent, that, you know, has a scientific value, especially when you can build a model of, you know, a number of those, uh, across different, different centuries. But in, in that book, we, we were careful to break the book into, um, i- into sections, you know, corresponding to different evolution of the culture, explaining first a couple of pages what was happening during that time in terms of new inventions, like when the telescope was invented, when, um, when certain things were discovered and so on. So w- we were careful to, to put it in, in context with every, uh, reinterpreting the, the description by the witness in the context that was appropriate.

Joe Rogan 1:05:44 Well, it was very thorough and very objective, which is what I really enjoyed about it, where you were very clear what we absolutely knew and very clear what could be nonsense and myth. And that one of the things that keeps occurring over and over again is these similar stories. The stories are really similar from the 1700s to the 1800s-

Jacques Vallée 1:06:09 Yes.

Joe Rogan 1:06:09 ... into the 20th century, and then you, uh, again now, it gets more muddy because now you have a bunch of people that realize that there's value in concocting a story and then talking about it and selling a book. And there's...... I think there's people that are grifters, and I think they... You know, I probably had a few of them on. (laughs) They've, they've, they are capitalizing on this desire that people have for stories.

Jacques Vallée 1:06:38 But also now, uh, we think that the government has the answer.

Joe Rogan 1:06:43 Yeah.

Jacques Vallée 1:06:44 So, uh, people spend their time, uh, uh, you know, writing to different agencies-

Joe Rogan 1:06:51 Mm-hmm.

Jacques Vallée 1:06:52 ... and listening on... and listening to reports from pilots.

Joe Rogan 1:06:56 Right.

Jacques Vallée 1:06:56 Which is fine, of course. Uh, and people in the military, people in the intelligence community. But... And those who are very valuable because they have... now they have instruments, you know, to actually measure what they see on the... an F18 and so on.

Joe Rogan 1:07:13 Right.

Jacques Vallée 1:07:13 And they're covered by radar and by AWACS and everything else. So we can rely on that. So, scientists and, you know, many people like the numerical aspect of it. I don't do that. You know, I mean, I, I don't pretend to have access to that. I mean, we had access under Bigelow, you know, and under Bass to some of that. Uh, you know, including some of the classified things that had happened. But there is a much richer pool of data which is... You know, a, a friend tells me about a sighting in, in the country somewhere, I can go there. I can go see the people and I can find out, you know, exactly what happened. And, uh, I continue to do that and that's most of my data, and it's, it's 10 times bigger than the stuff they talk about from the Pentagon. You know? I mean, it's, it's real data from... And I don't need to have a clearance to go see the, the people and sit down. If I'm lucky, they'll invite me for lunch and, you know, I can talk to the kids. I can talk to the wife. I can talk to the, the people who took care of the cattle and they'll, they'll tell me. And, um, that's where most of my information is really coming from. And it's not... You know, it's just very much in your face, uh, and, um, it's consistent.

Joe Rogan 1:08:46 How consistent are the shapes of the crafts?

Jacques Vallée 1:08:51 It's a tough question. You know, uh, many of the descriptions have to do with disks. You know, um, uh...

Joe Rogan 1:09:04 And eggs as well, right?

Jacques Vallée 1:09:05 Of, of different, different sizes. You know, some of them are very large. Uh, some... A number of descriptions have to do with, you know, for a long time, with cigar-shaped objects. You know, cylindrical and rounded at the end. Sometimes with what people describe as windows that may just be openings with light, uh, you know, in the side, side of it. It doesn't have to be what we think of as, as a window. And then you have some irregular shapes, you know, just balls of light, um, that physicists interpret as maybe plasma. But plasma doesn't survive in the air, you know? Shouldn't survive in the air more than a minute, maybe. But people have, you know, seen, uh, some of those things for minutes and longer. You know, long enough to take pictures of it and so on. And, and it's not necessarily glowing. It's not necessarily luminous the way, um, you know, plasma would be. So, uh, we don't... We don't know what they are, and they've been reported all over, all over the world. Again, they are... You know, uh, paintings of, of that kind of thing from the 18th century or the 17th century.

Joe Rogan 1:10:31 Yeah.

Jacques Vallée 1:10:32 So, um, that, that I've collected and published. So, uh-

Joe Rogan 1:10:38 What are the most compelling paintings?

Jacques Vallée 1:10:40 ... we have these different categories.

Joe Rogan 1:10:41 What are the most compelling paintings that we could, we could find right now from like the 1700s or 1800s?

Jacques Vallée 1:10:48 Um, I, I think there is... There is a beautiful, uh, beautiful painting of hills and three blue spheres that are not moving, that seem to be suspended in the air. Uh, very distinct blue, blue spheres that were seen and somebody, y- you know, recorded it and somebody did a painting of the scene. Those are things that people wanted to remember because they knew it was-

Joe Rogan 1:11:27 And what year was this painting from?

Jacques Vallée 1:11:29 Uh, I don't remember the year. I couldn't tell you.

Joe Rogan 1:11:32 But it's a very old painting?

Jacques Vallée 1:11:33 It's like 16th, 17th century.

Joe Rogan 1:11:35 Um, do you know the name of it, like, so Jamie could try to find it online?

Jacques Vallée 1:11:40 Uh, no. I could... I could send you the picture.

Joe Rogan 1:11:43 Okay. Okay. Um, so there's also a bunch of depictions of egg-shaped crafts.

Jacques Vallée 1:11:52 Yes.

Joe Rogan 1:11:53 This is very common as well, right?

Jacques Vallée 1:11:55 Yes.

Joe Rogan 1:11:56 And, um, the, the couple that you, uh, had in one of your books from... Was it The Mining People from, um... was it California or was it U- was it Nevada?

Jacques Vallée 1:12:08 I, I, uh, wrote a book, um-

Joe Rogan 1:12:12 The Shapings?

Jacques Vallée 1:12:13 ... with Paola Harris called Trinity about an egg-shaped object that happened in 1945 near, uh, White Sands.... that, uh, now we have reinvestigated it. The first book was criticized and, you know, appropriately by someone who said I hadn't gone to enough of the written records. Well, now I've done that, so we've republished the, the book. It's called Trinity, and it, it covers three cases. In all three cases, the object is egg-shaped, the size of a, a medium-sized truck, okay? Uh, it would fit in this room. You know, it would be ab- about the size of this room. Um, then there is a case in Socorro and there is a case in Valensole. Socorro and Valensole... And, and people have concentrated on the first one, you know, the one that... because it's, it, it's two years before Roswell and there were witnesses there, you know? In Roswell, there were no witnesses. There were people who came later who found the stuff and they reconstructed the story and it's a very interesting story. But at, um, Trinity, they saw it arrive and they saw it crash, and they were there for 10 days afterwards, uh, watching the recovery. So we... And they went inside. Uh, one of them went inside and his father went inside also. So we have a very rich description of that. And where is it in the literature? Nowhere. I mean, I know Paola Harris found this, con- did research for four years on that, and then told me about it and then we did another four years of research together at, at the site and we found a lot of correlations. But they are... The Socorro case and the Valensole case-

Joe Rogan 1:14:14 Could you, could you explain, tell me before we move on to that, those other cases, what correlations did you find?

Jacques Vallée 1:14:19 Well, uh, the... In all three cases, it's an egg-shaped object. In all three cases, there are traces that could be seen, could be, uh, um, described, could be, uh, analyzed. In all three cases, the beings are short. They are, you know, about, uh, uh, th- three feet, three and a half feet. They breathe air. Now, what kind of extraterrestrial is that-

Joe Rogan 1:14:52 Right.

Jacques Vallée 1:14:52 ... that comes here and breathes the air, okay? We don't go... If we go to the moon, we're not going to breathe the air and we wouldn't know how-

Joe Rogan 1:14:58 How do we know that it breathes at all?

Jacques Vallée 1:15:00 Hmm?

Joe Rogan 1:15:00 How do, how do we know that these things breathe at all? Just because they...

Jacques Vallée 1:15:03 Well, they had no breathing-

Joe Rogan 1:15:04 Right.

Jacques Vallée 1:15:05 ... equipment.

Joe Rogan 1:15:05 But how do we even know that they're-

Jacques Vallée 1:15:06 They were functioning normally.

Joe Rogan 1:15:07 ... biological?

Jacques Vallée 1:15:08 They had two eyes, uh, a small nose-

Joe Rogan 1:15:11 Mm-hmm.

Jacques Vallée 1:15:11 ... a small mouth.

Joe Rogan 1:15:12 But couldn't they possibly be some sort of, uh, a creation? Instead of, uh, being a biological entity, couldn't they be some sort of artificial life?

Jacques Vallée 1:15:21 So I, I've, um, I've asked, uh, uh, uh, Gary Nolan about that, you know? I mean-

Joe Rogan 1:15:28 Yeah.

Jacques Vallée 1:15:28 ... I'm not a biologist. And, um, I think i- it would be known if somebody had created, uh, uh, m- meta human-

Joe Rogan 1:15:41 I don't mean somebody. I mean-

Jacques Vallée 1:15:42 But, well...

Joe Rogan 1:15:42 ... another life form from somewhere else.

Jacques Vallée 1:15:45 There, there were, there were stories of the Russians, uh, actually thinking about creating a, a, a, a dwarf b- you know, human to pilot their ships because they didn't expect to have the energy, you know, the... to, to have a big rocket. It turned out they found that. Korolev built the big rocket, so they-

Joe Rogan 1:16:10 Oh, so they were trying to get tiny people to power their ships because they were lighter?

Jacques Vallée 1:16:14 But the, the CIA was looking into rumors that the Russians in the '50s be- you know, before Sputnik, that the Russians were trying to create a, uh, um, uh, a humanoid, uh, that, that could pilot a spaceship.

Joe Rogan 1:16:34 Well, I know that the Russians, there was some talk of them trying to create a human ape hybrid. They were trying to do something with chimpanzees and try to create some sort of a human chimpanzee hybrid for war, which is a terrifying thought-

Jacques Vallée 1:16:49 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:16:49 ... that they would... First of all, if they were successful, how terrifying would that be? But just that they were interested in doing that, creating a race of chimpanzee human warriors.

Jacques Vallée 1:17:03 Um, uh, there was no... To my knowledge, there hasn't been any correlation of that. And the, the creatures that are described in Socorro, in New Mexico, and in Valensole, in France, the... so those are three cases that I've been very involved in from the beginning, from the, from day one, um, uh, involve creatures that are about, you know, three feet tall, that breathe our air, hairless. Recognize our signals, you know, communicate with us-

Joe Rogan 1:17:40 Uh-huh.

Jacques Vallée 1:17:41 ... in funny ways, even men- mentally. I mean, the witnesses describe getting images in their minds and so on in all three cases. And the, um... uh, what's interesting is, you know, people can argue about Trinity all they want, like they argue about Roswell, but the, the case in Socorro and the case in, in France, in Valensole, were investigated by governments, you know, not by, uh, you know, the local, uh, UFO group. Although the local UFO group did a good job in all those cases, but they were... In Socorro, it was first the, you know, the local police, local policemen this... saw the-... the craft and the beings and described what happened. They, he was terrified, but, you know, when the thing took off, uh, he thought it was something to do with some new gadget or some work in the desert or... It's an area that's still in the same state today. I've gone back there with Dr. Hynek's son, you know-

Narrator 1:18:48 Oh, wow.

Jacques Vallée 1:18:49 ... with Paul Hynek a few months ago. I've gone several, several times there. And so after the police, uh, turned out the FBI was in town on another case, they had no jurisdiction in New Mexico for that particular case, it wasn't a federal case, but they helped preserve the ca- the traces, you know, the FBI way. And, uh, the local police was happy to have them there. And, and then there was the, the state police came in and did an investigation. And then people from the base, uh, you know, uh, came in with, with experts in, uh, in explosives, experts in recovery of, uh, of weapons and, and rockets and so on because they felt it might be something that had come from, um, you know, from the Trinity range that was out of its way-

Narrator 1:19:46 Right.

Jacques Vallée 1:19:47 ... and had crashed near Socorro-

Narrator 1:19:49 Right.

Jacques Vallée 1:19:49 ... in which case they might have responsibility, including financial responsibility if something was destroyed or whatever. So they... This was very serious. I have the whole file, okay? It's a big file.

Narrator 1:20:02 Right.

Jacques Vallée 1:20:02 Nobody's looking at it. I mean, the, the investigation in Washington, now they are saying, "We're going to look at the cases of the last 12 months." What, what kind of science is that? Can, can you imagine scientists reading this? And this is the way they are going to solve the UFO problem, uh, by looking at vague pictures of lights in the sky for one year? You know, why don't they go back to those records? Those are federal records, okay? The case in Valensole, five agencies of the French government. So this, this guy was a farmer. He had a field where he was growing plants for, to make perfume. So this was high level, you know, expensive crop. This wasn't just, you know, alfalfa or something. And he, he goes there at 5:00 in the morning because, uh, you know, he wants to do some... to water the, the thing, so before the sun is, is up because it's going to be very... it's in the south of France, it's going to be very hot. You can't work in the field dur- during the earl- early afternoon. So he wants to be done with that. He sees this contraption, you know, in the middle of the field crushing the, you know, the plants. And so he sneaks in and he's paralyzed, okay? Now, uh, there is an egg-shaped object just like the one, you know, at Trinity, just like the one in Socorro. It's the size of a, a mid-size truck. There are two creatures in front of it. Human, you know, human-looking, two eyes, breathing air. They look at him, sort of amused, and one of them has something on his belt. They takes out, points, point it at him and that's when he's paralyzed. Now, he's not... And, uh, you know, as you know, I'm not a doctor but I've gone to doctors about what kind of paralysis is that where you can stand up and watch something, you just can't move. They said, "Well, there is a type of paralysis which will just inhibit the motor, you know, motor nerves, where you..." but you'll still be up and aware. You're not going to fall down, you know, in a, in a heap. And from there he sees them going back inside the thing, the thing takes off. It takes off like a shot out of a gun and it vanishes in mid-air, okay? Now, he goes to see the gendarmes. This man is fairly wealthy. He owns quite a bit of, you know, several fields, expensive crops. His wife is the mayor of the town. The gendarmes are going to be very careful with him because he's also from the Resistance in World War II. When he was young, he joined the Resistance and the Resistance in that part of, uh, France fought in the, uh, in the Alps against the Germans and, you know, they, they were regarded as heroes of World War II. Uh, and so the gendarmes are very careful with him. There are some things he's not going to tell the gendarmes because he thinks... And I, I went there, he didn't want to talk to anybody from Paris. He didn't want to be on TV. He, he wanted to concentrate on his experience because he felt there was going to be something else. And he was aware of some of his buddies... Now, this is a part of France where people talk but they have secrets too. I mean, historically, you know, uh, there are things like that in the US, you know, parts where people are not going to talk to strangers.

Narrator 1:24:03 Right.

Jacques Vallée 1:24:03 The only reason I could go there was that I was... I, I went there with, um, uh, a lady who was from Paris, was from... with the government. She was with de Gaulle's government. She had the rank of ambassador and she had a vacation home there. So we went there for three days and she knew everybody there. And, uh, he told us what he...... thought might happen again. And, uh, he-- so he didn't want the gendarmes-

Joe Rogan 1:24:36 Why did he-

Jacques Vallée 1:24:37 ... mixed in with what, what he was doing.

Joe Rogan 1:24:38 Why did he think that something was gonna happen again?

Jacques Vallée 1:24:42 Um, they evidently, and you know, he swore us to secrecy about what it was, but evidently, there was communication-

Joe Rogan 1:24:52 Communication.

Jacques Vallée 1:24:52 ... with the beings when, when he was there. Now, uh, after, after the-

Joe Rogan 1:24:56 And so these beings, just tiny, looked like people, did they have different features than us? Or was it just human features?

Jacques Vallée 1:25:02 They, they are just like the ones at Trinity and like the ones at, um, Socorro. So in that book you have actually, uh, two, two, and three, you have seven creatures that are humanoid, that breathe our air, that l- seem to understand us, you know, the visual, uh, you know, there is visual contact. Um, well, we can have visual contact with animals.

Joe Rogan 1:25:31 Right.

Jacques Vallée 1:25:31 I mean, that doesn't mean they are human or meta-human. But the, uh, there, there, there is messages that come through all of that-

Joe Rogan 1:25:42 Mm-hmm.

Jacques Vallée 1:25:42 ... that the witnesses are reluctant to talk about in all three cases. So in Socorro, finally, the, the Air Force went there. They flew the Air Force out because the Air Force said, "Well, you know, that's just a, a gadget, you know, a-- from, from the, uh, uh, from the base." And, you know, that was stupid. So they finally sent, uh, Dr. Hynek there. And, uh, uh, uh, Dr. Hynek asked me to organize the, the files that were coming. I was at Northwestern at the time, you know, working, working. I had done my, my PhD already and I was on the staff of the computing center, and we had a small team trying to help, you know, free (laughs) , uh, trying to help Hynek keep the files together. So we, we were, you know, in communication with him the whole time, and then I, I put the files together and I have a file. You know, this is the official file.

Joe Rogan 1:26:44 So these people were reluctant to talk about what these creatures were communicating with them.

Jacques Vallée 1:26:49 They, they-

Joe Rogan 1:26:49 But did they talk about it at all?

Jacques Vallée 1:26:51 It was, it, it was very personal. And-

Joe Rogan 1:26:54 Very personal.

Jacques Vallée 1:26:55 Yeah. It, it... there, there had been a communication that transcended their life. That was something else. Something outside. So you could almost call it a, sort of a religious feeling, but it wasn't... uh, uh, it, it wasn't about, uh, divinity or God specifically, but it was about s- you know, the other side of life.

Joe Rogan 1:27:27 Hmm.

Jacques Vallée 1:27:28 Some... a, a bigger meaning for life.

Joe Rogan 1:27:31 Hmm.

Jacques Vallée 1:27:33 Uh, that's, that's their interpretation. It may not be... there may be other things that they are trying to communicate but...

Joe Rogan 1:27:42 But it was very profound for them.

Jacques Vallée 1:27:44 You... yes. But-

Joe Rogan 1:27:46 And all three cases had similar stories in that regard?

Jacques Vallée 1:27:50 And in all three cases there are, there are traces that were measured, there were, you know, uh, uh... uh, uh, there is technology of sort. And in, in the case of Socorro, people came up with all kinds of ideas that maybe it was a balloon, you know? I mean, uh, special, a special balloon, right?

Joe Rogan 1:28:13 Mm-hmm.

Jacques Vallée 1:28:13 There were only 12 of them in, in the world and so on. Well, in, in the book, uh, people haven't noticed it, but in, in the book, I, I, I was able to solve that problem because I found a transcript of a conversation with a man who was head of a motor pool at the... uh, on, on the, you know, army range in, uh, at White Sands. Um, and he had given his team some instructions on, you know, how to m- m- make sure that the motor pool was wor- working really well because White Sands is so big. When, when people went home, uh, they could get lost, you know, at, at White Sands, and then how are you going to find them? I mean, there are tracks, but there is no paved road at the time. Uh, how are you going to, you know, find them? So you can launch a helicopter the next day looking for, you know, a lost car somewhere-

Joe Rogan 1:29:19 Right.

Jacques Vallée 1:29:19 ... with a family in it (laughs) . But, but so he made rules, uh, that they had to call periodically to report where they were when they went home, you know, 50 miles away across the desert, so, uh, so they could find them if there was something wrong with the car. He's driving home with his family. This is after the Socorro thing is done, you know, they are all interrogating Lonnie Zamora, the cop who was driving that thing, and he sees a light over the mountains in the southwest towards Mexico, uh, but it's still, you know, it, it's still in New Mexico, but it's, it's in that direction. Uh, uh, a light that's not a star, i- it's really bright. And the, the light gets brighter and brighter, and his car dies. Now, he's head of a motor pool, okay, for the base. Everybody reports to him, and they have all the, you know, all the, uh, army cars and, uh, trucks and everything else, the half-tracks, um...So, uh, he looks at that thing. Uh, he tries to call his team. The radio doesn't work. Radio should work. Radio doesn't work. And the- the thing gets very bright and then it recedes. It goes- it goes away, the way it apparently came in. We don't know if it came in or if it just got bright. Okay. Uh, the sta- the car starts. Um, he goes home and then the next day, he goes to his shop. He gets his staff together. He says, "You guys are going to take this car apart. I want to see every screw and every piece of it and every lever and everything, and the seats and so on. I want to see all of that on the floor. And you're going to test it and you're going to tell me what's changed or, if anything, how that car stopped in the middle of the desert." And they couldn't find anything. And that report was an official report, okay? That was never published and it- it nails the whole thing, you know? That this was not a balloon. This was not an hallucination. The- the- the patrolman wasn't drunk like they accused him of, or- or making up a story and so on. The, uh... Lonnie Zamora, when Dr. Hynek, uh, interrogated him, he said he wanted to talk to a priest and confess to a priest before he would talk to Dr. Hynek, okay?

Narrator 1:32:11 Whoa.

Jacques Vallée 1:32:11 That's the kind of man he was. And they essentially destroyed this guy because they thought it was, you know, bad reputation for the town of Socorro. Tourists wouldn't come there because they'd be afraid of strange things flying.

Narrator 1:32:27 Hmm.

Jacques Vallée 1:32:27 And the Air Force said, "Well, it's a one witness case." You know? "There's this patrolman who saw this." There were 12 witnesses. There was a- a guy, uh, uh, who was driving on the main road, the same road where the patrolman had been driving, who... The- the thing passed right over his car. He thought he was going to be driven off the road by this big oval thing that just went right over the- the- the roof of the car into the desert. Uh, well, he called the... Uh, he- he called the police and reported it. There's a wri- a written report. He signed that report. We know his name. There were-

Narrator 1:33:08 Without him having any knowledge of what happened.

Jacques Vallée 1:33:11 Uh, that's right.

Narrator 1:33:12 All right.

Jacques Vallée 1:33:12 Uh, I- I mean, uh, he saw this, uh- uh- some-

Narrator 1:33:15 Independently.

Jacques Vallée 1:33:16 You know, one of your gadgets trying to drive me off the road, you know?

Narrator 1:33:20 Right.

Jacques Vallée 1:33:20 There were- there were several people on the road on the other side of this little, you know, desert thing that's... You know, when it rains, they- the water rains all over the place. It wa- washes everything out, just sand and rocks. But on the other side, there is a main road. Several people on the road saw the thing take off and reported it because it was just so strange. So, the Air Force put that aside. They neglected to... You know, this was... And they- they just kept saying it was a one witness case. It wasn't. Most of those cases where they say it was one witness and they... You have to look at the- you have to look for the other guys.

Narrator 1:34:05 Hmm.

Jacques Vallée 1:34:07 And, um, again, uh, you know... I- I brought you something. Can I tell you about it?

Narrator 1:34:12 Sure. What'd you bring?

Jacques Vallée 1:34:13 So this is something that, uh, the case was so interesting that Dr. Nolan and I and a couple of friends wrote it up and published it in the prime, uh, astronautics review in- in the world, okay? It's... Uh, so after... Uh, it took a couple of years for them to a- agree to look at it and so on, to look at the analysis. This happened in a suburb of Omaha, Nebraska. But on the Iowa side. There is this town, this suburb with a park. This is, uh, about- about a week before Christmas in 1977. Okay? Um, people are there having a good time in the park in the evening. It's- it's getting, you know, it's getting dark and... Um, and, um, I want to make sure I'm... Yeah. Um, the- they see something in the sky that looks like one of those boxes there. You know, it looks like a- a- a round box with- with lights around it and the lights are going- are going around sort of, and- and it's- it's pretty high and it's flying over the- the town. Um, and then a- a mass of steel, liquid steel falls in the park. It falls on the levee in the park. There is about a half a ton of it, liquid, glowing. I- it has nothing, no business being there. So you- you have this mass of metal. Uh, obviously they call the-

Narrator 1:36:15 So it's glowing. You're saying it's molten? So it's liquid that's hot.

Jacques Vallée 1:36:16 Yes. The weather is freezing.

Narrator 1:36:18 Okay.

Jacques Vallée 1:36:18 We know the temperature and everything else. It's freezing. The- the grass is on fire around it. They call the firemen. The firemen call the police. The police gets there and the firemen get there. They- they stop the fire. The fire is, you know, would have died by itself. There's no- no problem there. They take pictures of the thing glowing. I have the pictures, infrared.... uh, uh, uh, no, uh, Pa- Polaroid pictures of the- of- of the- the thing glowing in the grass, burning. Uh, I mean liquid. And, uh, it's going to stay liquid for a couple of hours and it cools down gradually and then people take pieces of it as souvenirs. So I have the pieces of it and there they are. Now, um, uh, there was analysis done by two labs. Obviously, the question is, where- where did that come from? I mean,