Forbidden Science Dispatches #8

Let’s Have Some Levity, Shall We? The Funny, Cheerful, Poetic, and Idiosyncratic within Jacques Vallée’s Diaries

You can find prior dispatches in the Table of Discontents.

Sometimes I fear I can be a little dour. It’s through no fault of my own, I would argue. The world of ufology and the fringe is a frustrating and maddening sludge of unexplained occurrences, ulterior motives, and, as the name of the publication suggests, spooks playing games. However, Jacques Vallée’s Forbidden Science journals are not solely about UFOs or other forms of paranormal research. This fact is a beneficial distinction, part of what makes them rise above their competition within the broader genre of Fortean literature. They are emotional and intimate portraits of the fringe “scenes” as they progressed throughout the decades, often most interested in the omnipresent human factor. The entries are filled with humor, love, and the highs and lows of daily life. Vallée too, while noted primarily for his work in ufology, is a man who wears many hats and the journals covers them all, giving a complete picture of his always strange and interesting endeavors. He sought out the odd and the mystical, but the journal is not a spiritual manual—they are notebooks of everyday occurrences while still being active within varying subcultural groups that often have intriguing overlaps.

Mahar, Ted. “UFO scientist says search needs skeptics: Jacques Vallee employs both respect and analysis.” The Oregonian. 4 June 1990. https://www.newspapers.com/article/the-oregonian/166335636/.

Vallée at times welcomed the madness brought on by engaging in ufology, but he is consistently grounded by the deep romantic bond he shared with his late wife Janine. Married since early in volume one, the couple is consistently noted by those around them as aspirational. Aimé Michel, French UFO researcher and early influence on Vallée, gave his opinion on the first volume of the journals in 1992: “Your relationship with Janine makes me cry, the marvellous balance you two have found.”¹ Vallée too is quick to remark how happy he is to see Janine after any amount of time apart—a true ufological wifeguy, so to speak. When Janine asks him if he thinks that “solitude (…) is the truest and deepest state of the human mind,” he is quick to disagree. “I reach my deepest levels when I am with her,” Jacques writes.²

Janine is always supportive of his fringe research, even taking part in mystical experiments at their Spring Hill observatory, but she also serves as the voice of reason when her husband winds up deep in the muck of nonsense and mind games. After Jacques is left bewildered by a contradiction-loaded interaction with Kit Green, she is quick to call a spade a spade. “Janine has read about my conversation with Kit,” Vallée writes. “She was incensed. She thinks the Spooks are trying to use me.”³ Often understated in histories outside of Vallée’s retelling, Janine was a close and important collaborator. In addition to co-authoring the 1966 book Challenge to Science together, it was partially through her pressing that the Forbidden Science journals even reached the public eye: She tells Jacques in the late 80s that he has “a duty to publish Forbidden Science, given all the confusion about the phenomenon and the misconceptions about the Air Force and Allen Hynek.”⁴ Reviewing them before publication in 1991, she is bemused to find an early section where Jacques claims his “desk is finally clear and (he’s) eager to leave the UFO field.”⁵ She chides him for saying the same thing for three decades, but I get it. I’ve heard several researchers say this in their elder years, still being completely unable to put down the pen.

While Janine (and I) have suspicions about Kit Green, he too was not without more humorous moments. Amidst a serious discussion about Brazilian UFO events with medical evidence, the Bennewitz affair, and suspicions of top-secret UFO projects, the dialogue is interrupted by something shocking and abhorrent: “(Green) ordered a cup of coffee and some apple pie, adding cheddar cheese on top of it. He said it was an old Wisconsin custom.”⁶ This “abominable” and “disgusting” clash of food items, was apparently something Green was fond of since childhood. “I never had ice cream on my pie until I got to Colorado as a student,” he tells Vallée, who is quick to respond: “That must have been a happy day for you!”⁷ If his CIA credentials weren’t enough to make one wary to trust Green, certainly putting cheddar cheese on apple pie is cause for glaring suspicion.

Small humorous moments like this are the icing on the cake for the always interesting diary entries. At another point, as Vallée was leaving a 1990 meeting with members of the Society for Scientific Exploration, he ran into one of assumedly many cranks waiting on the sidewalk outside to sell their story or invention. “We passed a van parked on the sidewalk and were harpooned by an inventor who showed us a strange energy machine powered by a magnetic flywheel,” Vallée writes. The man told Vallée that he had come with the express purpose of talking to him. “We've seen you on TV,” he says.⁸ When Vallée straightforwardly asks them if their supposed “free energy” device runs the van they had arrived in, he receives an unexpected response in the negative. Yet, “without batting an eye,” the man tells him it could.⁹ Characters such as these pop in and out of Vallée’s writing, giving the broad fringe community the much-needed texture it deserves. While he is himself an upstanding venture capitalist who dives into the subject as a hobby, he’s not afraid to get deep in the reeds. Vallée speaks of being able to make friends with nearly anyone despite disagreements over the phenomena. This affability means that a wide array of personalities get at least passing mentions within the journals. One entry recalls Vallée’s experiences as part of a panel for Boston WBZ news station which featured:

An articulate woman abductee from Strieber’s Communion Foundation, a woman who believes the Aliens have implanted a device in her arm, a MUFON representative, a fellow from Unarius who’s in psychic contact with 33 planets, astronomer Steve O'Meara of Sky and Telescope, and a psychiatrist who explains everything as sexual repression.¹⁰

And a partridge in a pear tree! Vallée, somewhat of the idiosyncratic odd one out who does not match the typical skeptic or typical believer, was nevertheless able to make friends on this trip. That is, “except for the stiff Unarian, firmly in league with the Ascended Masters, who spoke to no one.”¹¹ Someone from the Aetherius Society would have at least given him a friendly “om mani padme hum.”

Notorious fringe figures make curious cameos throughout Vallée’s explorations and he is refreshingly honest about his impressions. Describing an interaction with Al Bielek in 1969—long before his outlandish claims about the Philadelphia Experiment and Montauk Project—Vallée remarks on his odd behavior, acting “like a secret agent whose pockets are full of microfilms and who wants to make sure you know it.” However, he notes, this is “the exact opposite (…) of what a real secret agent would actually look like.”¹² Vallée is often quick to recognize who is feeding him a line and who has genuine information, though, as always in this field, there will be quite convincing bullshitters. Bielek was apparently not one of them.

Receiving similarly unflattering depictions was Ron Blackburn, an Air Force colonel and so-called Aviary member with a shadowy reputation. He was another individual in all the wrong places at the right time as far as suspicious activity within the UFO subculture goes, alleged to be previously stationed at Kirkland Air Force Base as a microwave scientist and later employed by remote viewer Major Ed Dames’ company PSI-TECH.¹³ Vallée treats Blackburn with near immediate suspicion, not helped by his appearance and demeanor: “He walks stiffly and expresses himself hesitatingly without moving his head, his lizard eyes scanning in a subtle, disquieting way.”¹⁴ He later catches Blackburn spreading scurrilous rumors, leading him to wonder if he “should (…) trust Blackburn again when he” talks about holding “the hardware from Roswell.”¹⁵ While Blackburn will probably be returned to, I wanted to note the little bit of humor that arises from Vallée’s colorful recollections of Blackburn’s suspicious mannerisms and general strangeness.

Even in venture capitalist land, there are moments of levity. I am not exactly a capitalist myself—although I still plan to read Vallée’s Four Elements of Financial Alchemy for my own amusement—so the journal entries that focus on this aspect of his career do not usually catch my eye. Vallée’s business mentor, noted VC pioneer Fred Adler, is not an individual I would agree with in most regards or even like as a person. A 1981 New York Times article noted that Adler was a “colorful and outspoken financier” who was prone to workaholism and an aggressive bluntness. “Fred once got a guy so mad he ripped a sign off a wall. (…) He is very hard on people's egos,” a president at one Adler-backed company tells the reporter.¹⁶ Nevertheless, Adler has such a hyperactive and brash presence within in the journals, I can’t help but smirk. After being late to a dinner he was attending with Vallée due to flight delays, he showed up in a foul mood: “He ridiculed the French, bad-mouthed the Germans, thundered against the Japanese and boasted that he was about to spend $300,000 of his own money to promote Ross Perot's presidential bid.”¹⁷ Given how strange that campaign wound up being, there’s something darkly humorous about a bunch of ethnic denigration being followed by Perot campaign contributions.

I am, of course, interested in the strange little comedic incidents that arise when you engage with the more outlandish ufological participants, that’s half of why I started following the subject in the first place. Yet, I’ll be the first to admit I get lamely sentimental reading the niche journals of this famous ufologist. On Janine’s birthday in 1990, Vallée writes: “I took her in my arms and told her the plain truth: I want to grow old with her. I will be here with her, caring for her, as long as I can.”¹⁸ Maybe it’s because I am recently married myself, but I have readily mentioned to many friends how emotionally devastating it will be to read entries around Janine Vallée’s death in 2010. I have spent so much time with Vallée’s writings, much of it more personal than what is usually presented within fringe literature, that I have come to hold great compassion for him. And while I have already ruined the goal of this article by not touching on negative things, that’s the beauty of the Forbidden Science journals: In some ways, they are undistilled life. We bear witness to Vallée’s experiences with birth, death, love, hate, all the petty annoyances as well as his professional heights and quiet reflective moments. It’s why I enjoy reading it so much.

Even when Vallée is still feeling raw from his friend and professional colleague J. Allen Hynek passing away, he gives his uncensored recollections both good and bad. He and mutual friend Fred Beckman, a photographic analyst who assisted them in UFO research, recalled some of Hynek’s more embarrassing moments, such as his charming ultra-American faux-pas when visiting Paris and London:

Allen decided to take pictures of the new rubber-wheel métro. An irate woman across the track, seeing this character in checkered jacket, Tyrolian hat, and Texas silver dollar tie, aiming a stereo camera towards her, called the cops and tried to have Dr. Hynek arrested. (…) He was introduced to the Lord Mayor of London and immediately thrust a cheap tape recorder under his nose, asking him to “say a few words for the people of Chicago...” (…) He visited the House of Lords (…) and decided he had to take a picture of the Thames River. They nearly broke the august windows when they tried to open them: The frames had been kept shut for 400 years and were coated with dust and grime.¹⁹

Little memories like this bring Hynek’s human nature to the forefront, a man who is often considered to be nothing beyond the preeminent UFO researcher of the 60s and 70s. I will never forget Vallée’s somber reaction to news of Hynek’s death, a complicated man who accompanies the reader across the course of hundreds of journal entries. “I went out in the Kalispell night, looking up at Allen’s starry sky through my tears,” he writes. “From my room at the Outlaw Inn I can see Flathead Lake, which looks grandiose and cruel.”²⁰ Throughout his notes we see Vallée mourn and reminisce, getting despondent and even angry, but always treasuring the friendship they had with one another. Paranormal research can tend to be cold and calculated, all about science, hard facts, and documentation. Even the more emotionally resonant experiencer testimony often fails to hit the thoughtful poeticism that Vallée expresses throughout. “I always think of Allen when I fly over the magnificent landscapes of the American West, with its impression of infinite freedom, of timeless beauty beyond the wanderings of our lives,” he writes.²¹ The reader can feel the loss and the feelings and memories that remain.

Since we’ve basically reached the halfway point, I thought it appropriate to step away from the UFO research and shadowy clandestine activity to express why the journals are so compelling. It’s not some grand rubric about how to investigate the paranormal nor is it the self-indulgent memoirs of someone who considers themselves a titan of the field. Instead, the journal entries are marked with vulnerability and careful consideration of the events and experiences that have unfolded. Even as Vallée gives an impressively thoughtful and intriguing tour of the fringe as it develops through the decades, much like life itself, it’s the small moments that count the most. I’d almost recommend reading the journals to a general audience if it weren’t so full of niche nonsense. I’ll settle for recommending it to everyone with a vague knowledge of UFO and fringe communities. Just don’t go into it expecting the key to the UFO mystery. Forbidden Science may contain certain illuminations, but they mostly involve very human affairs and very human relationships. That’s the most important part of these stories anyway, maybe that is the inherent lesson.

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Thank you to The Anomalist for linking to the most recent dispatch from Forbidden Science and for publishing great editions of all six volumes. I was very excited to complete my set with the arrival of the recently released volume 6. Email me at gettingspooked@protonmail.com with any questions, comments, recommendations, leads, or paranormal stories. You can find me on Twitter at @TannerFBoyle1, on Bluesky at @tannerfboyle.bsky.social, or on Instagram at @gettingspooked. Until next time, stay spooked.

1. Vallée, Jacques. Forbidden Science 4: The Spring Hill Chronicles – The Journals of Jacques Vallée, 1990-1999. San Antonio: Anomalist Books, 2019. Page 131.

2. Ibid., page 67.

3. Ibid., page 175.

4. Vallée, Jacques. Forbidden Science 3: On the Trail of Hidden Truths – The Journals of Jacques Vallée 1980-1989. San Antonio: Anomalist Books, 2012. Page 425.

5. Vallée, Jacques. Forbidden Science 4: The Spring Hill Chronicles – The Journals of Jacques Vallée, 1990-1999. San Antonio: Anomalist Books, 2019. Page 106.

6. Ibid., page 54.

7. Ibid.

8. Ibid., page 58.

9. Ibid.

10. Ibid., page 38.

11. Ibid.

12. Vallée, Jacques. Forbidden Science 1: A Passion for Discovery – The Journals of Jacques Vallée, 1957-1969. San Antonio: Anomalist Books, 1992. Page 287-288.

13. Guyatt, David. “Anti-Personnel ‘Soft-Kill’ Em Weaponry.” World Affairs: The Journal of International Issues 9, no. 4. Winter 2005. Page 51. https://www.jstor.org/stable/48531829.

14. Vallée, Jacques. Forbidden Science 4: The Spring Hill Chronicles – The Journals of Jacques Vallée, 1990-1999. San Antonio: Anomalist Books, 2019. Page 33.

15. Ibid., page 216.

16. Crittenden, Ann. “Venture Capitalist: A Rise to Riches.” The New York Times. 6 January 1981. https://www.nytimes.com/1981/01/06/business/venture-capitalist-a-rise-to-riches.html.

17. Vallée, Jacques. Forbidden Science 4: The Spring Hill Chronicles – The Journals of Jacques Vallée, 1990-1999. San Antonio: Anomalist Books, 2019. Page 118.

18. Ibid., page 18.

19. Ibid., page 112-113.

20. Vallée, Jacques. Forbidden Science 3: On the Trail of Hidden Truths – The Journals of Jacques Vallée 1980-1989. San Antonio: Anomalist Books, 2012. Page 237.

21. Ibid., page 271.