New Realities, November 9, 2010
Summary
This audio is an interview with Jacques Valleé, the author who recently co-wrote a book with Chris Aubeck called ‘Wonders in the Sky’. The book looks at unexplained aerial phenomena from antiquity up to 1879. In this interview, Vallee discusses the many theories of UFOs, pointing out that there is more to it than just the extraterrestrial hypothesis.
Transcript
Alan Steinfeld
Welcome to New Realities. This is Alan Steinfeld, and on this show I’ve done many programs about the investigations into UFOs, anomalous phenomena, what exactly is going on. And tonight’s guest is very much a part of this body of research, and a very important person in understanding the whole phenomena. He’s the author of a new book along with his co-author, Chris Aubeck, called Wonders in the Sky by Penguin Tarcher. And it’s a great collection of the history of UFO sightings. And we’ll call them UFOs, from ancient times up until 1880. Jacques, welcome.
Jacques Valleé
Thank you, pleasure to speak with you.
Alan Steinfeld
Well, you cite 500 cases in here, in this book, and it convinced me that it wasn’t just something that these sightings weren’t things that just started in 1947, like many UFO researchers claim. As far as that, I’m convinced that this phenomena has been around a long time. But we still don’t know what it is, is really the first question, what’s going on?
Jacques Valleé
Well, you know in science, when you encounter a mystery, one of the ways to approach it is to look for other instances of it, and you want to ask when did it begin? Are there other instances of it in other contexts? And do you see any patterns emerging? And when I first became interested in UFOs, like everybody else, I thought the best hypothesis is the extraterrestrial visitation hypothesis, and obviously I’m a strong believer that there is life throughout the universe. This is what we were speculating 50 years ago or 40 years ago. Today the evidence is increasing with the discovery of new planets and so on. The problem is that as we become smarter at analyzing UFO cases or UFO reports, they don’t fall into a pattern that’s consistent with the classic view of spacecraft from the sky. And so it’s very important to go back and look at other hypotheses, and by the way, in this particular book, number one we’re not calling them UFOs, we’re just looking at unexplained aerial phenomena, from antiquity to essentially the modern times. We stop in 1879 because we wanted to cover a period when there was nothing human in the sky. No airplanes, no dirigibles even. And we don’t really have a theory that we’re trying to prove, we just want to put the cases in front of the reader.
Alan Steinfeld
Right, I mean you’re very known, and it’s caused quite a controversy when you said in your publications that these ships may not be extraterrestrial. But you are admitting that there’s another phenomena that we’re not aware of that could be at work, but I don’t see any reason looking over these cases why they might not be extraterrestrial, these aerial phenomena.
Jacques Valleé
Well, you’re absolutely right. I’ve never discounted the extraterrestrial theory. I’m just saying it’s not the only one. It will always, it’s a big cosmos out there. It can certainly produce all kinds of things. And it would be rash to say that none of the phenomena of the universe that involve consciousness or forms of life could come to visit us. It will always be one of the theories we have to consider. However, there are many other theories that have not been considered because people have screened everything else out. And I think one of the things you can see in this book is that when we look at the patterns, the patterns are consistent across the entire history of man. And one of the fascinating aspects of this is that it forces us to rethink what is consciousness, what is human history, it illustrates the history of civilization in very interesting ways. As Professor Hufford pointed out in the wonderful foreword that he wrote for the book, Professor Hufford had written a classic book in anthropology called The Terror that Comes from the Sky. And what we have is a phenomenon that the witnesses describe as something that could come from anywhere any time. They don’t describe in most cases, they don’t describe a spacecraft that comes from the sky and lands and then takes off again with any kind of propulsion that resembles the propulsion systems we know. What they describe is something that very often appears out of nowhere, does something with transformations of shape, with topological transformations, it can merge with other objects, for example. There are beings associated with it, beings very often described as beings of light, which by the way gave inspiration to many of our religious traditions. And then it disappears on the spot. There are things that appear inside somebody’s bedroom, for example. Well, that’s not any kind of spacecraft that I know of. And if the phenomenon can do that, then it could come from other dimensions. The idea of other dimensions was very marginal in physics, you know, 40 years ago when I wrote Passport to Magonia, for example. But today it’s mainstream physics. And as we look at what physicists are describing now to account for, they’re not interested in UFOs, they’re trying to account for phenomena in cosmology and in particle physics and quantum mechanics and so on, where they invoke the idea of multiple universes with multiple dimensions. If that’s the case, then you have to look at a wider spectrum of hypotheses, including hypotheses where human consciousness itself plays a role. So I’m not saying they’re not, it could not be extraterrestrial, I’m saying that to account for it we have to have something much less simplistic than the classic series B films from the 50s. This is not ordinary science fiction. It’s not your daddy’s science fiction. This is complex. It’s complex, it’s rich, and it’s about time for science to really study it.
Alan Steinfeld
Well, I agree. It is a rich phenomenon, and just to say they’re extraterrestrials because there does seem to be a paranormal, let’s say, or these beings or ships or whatever you call them seem to affect the way people think. They seem to, I mean in some cases, they emanate some kind of feel that creates a distortion or, I mean in some cases a distortion in the way reality is looked at. So there’s been a lot of paranormal background to these phenomena that somehow has to do with human consciousness. So I agree with you, is that true of a lot of cases or just some cases that you’ve seen?
Jacques Valleé
Well, as you know, I’ve been doing this research for a long time, with many colleagues in science and in other disciplines. 20 years ago we would have said the interaction with consciousness and the paranormal effects are rare. In fact, at the beginning we were just discounting them, we were saying these people were terrified and they had a psychological reaction to it and they thought that the object had disappeared on the spot, in fact their perceptions were altered and so on. But now I would have to say it’s the reverse, the paranormal effect is almost the rule. And you see that even in the older cases.
Alan Steinfeld
Right. And I think that’s a really important point because it takes us into the understanding of what consciousness is. Like you said, consciousness is not just one state of awareness, but I think, I think maybe you’re on the right track, and as far as understanding consciousness we might understand the phenomena in greater depth.
Jacques Valleé
Well, at least we need a model of it that encompasses human consciousness. We cannot just look at it by going into the field and measuring the traces and measuring radioactivity and looking at pictures and so on. I mean, we have to do that. We have to look at the physical parameters as much as we can, but we also have to look at the sociological level, the psychological level, and the medical level as well. Many people describe medical effects that range from just physiological reactions, you remember in Close Encounters where the witness has a sunburn on half of his face, well that is something that is often described or described in quite a few cases, the effects of ultraviolet, also effects on the eyes, effects of paralysis, but there are also cases that are pathological rather than just physiological. Cases where people are actually injured. And I’m glad to see that there are now some doctors, some medical researchers who are involved looking at those cases.
Alan Steinfeld
Well, what do you think about Roger Leir’s extracting of implants that seem to be alien in origin?
Jacques Valleé
I’m not convinced by any of that.
Alan Steinfeld
Okay. Cause recently he was…
Jacques Valleé
After reading the analysis of these implants, they could be accounted for by random objects that have been picked up by the body. Sometimes a person might be unaware that they’ve stepped on a rusty nail when they were kids running on the beach, and that rusty nail can travel, and there are, I’ve spoken to dermatologists about this, I’ve had people in my family, for example, who have been injured, someone in my family had been injured in World War I by shrapnel, and that shrapnel came back to the surface 50 years later. And you know, the body can do extraordinary things with foreign objects, so I would have to see an analysis validated by experts that showed that the objects are truly of an artificial structure of some sort. The what I’ve seen so far could be accounted for by random objects picked up by the body.
Alan Steinfeld
Well I’ll actually, if I talk to Roger Leir, he just did a program about the relationship between these metal objects and meteorite composition. So there might be some further development in that area that you should look at. But I appreciate your skeptical side because it makes everything you report more solid in that way.
Jacques Valleé
Well, you know in my business I work with high technology in Silicon Valley, and that’s an area where you have to have an open mind, because I have people in my office every day who prove to me that what I thought I knew may have been true at one time, you know, when I went to the university, but it’s not true anymore because they’ve invented something else. And so I have to be both open-minded and skeptical. I mean, I have the right to ask these questions and to ask for proof. I have the right to be wrong, but I don’t have the right to be naive.
Alan Steinfeld
Right, right. Have you yourself ever seen anything that you couldn’t explain in the sky?
Jacques Valleé
Yes, twice. Once when I was a teenager with my mother, this was in the summer, we were both in the yard and she called my attention to an object that was shiny, was a disc with a dome on top, this was middle of the afternoon.
Alan Steinfeld
In New York, you said? In New York?
Jacques Valleé
No, no, no, this was in France. This was outside Paris. And a friend of mine who lived about three-quarters of a mile away from me had seen the same thing with binoculars and described it exactly the same way I did. Essentially a lens or a disc with a dome on top and it was shiny like aluminum. And then my first job as an astronomer was at the Paris Observatory and we were tracking satellites in the early days of the space program, and on several nights in a row, all of us in the team tracked an object that was very bright and was obviously not an airplane, a retrograde object, completely unidentified, was not one of the known satellites, and in those days there were very few very bright satellites. We wanted to compute an orbit based on the points we had measured and our boss confiscated the tape and erased it. And that is one of the things that really got me started into this research because here we were a team of professional astronomers at a very official observatory, you know, Paris Observatory, and we were seeing something and measuring it, something that was unidentified in the sky and we did not even tell our colleagues and we did not, we certainly didn’t tell the public. And this was not part of a cover-up on the part of the French government or anything, it was purely fear of ridicule, fear for this man’s career.
Alan Steinfeld
But do you think there is definitely a cover-up among the governments, I mean it seems like…
Jacques Valleé
Uh, I…
Alan Steinfeld
Well you’re not sure.
Jacques Valleé
Well, it’s not that simple. When people talk about disclosure and cover-up you have to ask a cover-up of what? There certainly is a cover-up of some of the data. We know that because we’ve all spoken to pilots and to control tower operators who describe having recorded something or seen something and then they are approached by very official looking people who tell them not to not to publish it and not to repeat it, and confiscate the data. So that data has to go somewhere. So to that extent, yes, it’s a cover-up. The question is, does the quote, “government”, whatever that is, have an answer? You know, you can cover up a lot of things, that doesn’t mean that you know what they are. And having a lot of data, and I believe the government has a lot of data, every government, not just the U.S. government. So you have to explain why there is a worldwide cover-up. But I believe that governments have a lot of data, certainly the military does, that should be turned over to science. But that doesn’t mean that they have, they, whoever they are, have an answer. That’s where I draw the line with many of my colleagues who are convinced that the proof exists in some basement of the Pentagon or something.
Alan Steinfeld
Right. And they maybe they don’t have an answer and that’s why they are covering it up because I mean I don’t think there’ll be panic around the world as some people say. I think it’s like we’re getting closer to the truth of our place within a cosmos, it seems like.
Jacques Valleé
It would be a watershed. It would be a major strategic change. But in that kind of situation, the people who panic are the elites. It’s not the population who panics. I mean, you’ve certainly seen that in a number of places, including September 11. The people in New York rallied around the poor people who were trapped in those towers. It’s the upper level of the government that panicked.
Alan Steinfeld
Do you think that, yeah, no it’s true, and it’s the government that’s in fear, and people will accept it I feel, and might affect their political or spiritual or religious beliefs, but that’s always been changing. So…
Jacques Valleé
Well, it depends how the phenomenon would present itself. And I, you know, I’m not smart enough to build a scenario around that. I don’t know how in the long run what the what the effects would be. I think in the initial stages in the first few days of a revelation for example, that there are other forms of consciousness on earth, I don’t think that the public would panic. I think again that there could be a panic of the elites.
Alan Steinfeld
Right. But the phenomena itself, I mean looking at this book, it doesn’t seem like it’s actually changed in the last thousand or so years. Is that true? Do you notice a… an evolution?
Jacques Valleé
Well, that is one of the things we would have to explain. Any new theory would have to explain that. But it’s certainly one of the things that stands out from reading this book, I think, is that it has had a major impact on history, and the impact is all the larger because the phenomenon is not recognized. And to the extent that science, I think science has a big responsibility here. If you saw a UFO tonight in the sky, you would have no place to report it, and no scientist would want to listen to you. What an indictment of what science has become. When you read the records that we’ve assembled, for example, of when you get to the 17th, especially to the 18th century, to the Enlightenment and so on, the people who are reporting unknown objects in the sky are some of the founders of science. You know, Cassini, Messier, Lagrange, people of that caliber. The Secretary of the Royal Society in England. These people were completely open-minded, and they were openly publishing the fact that they had seen something in the sky that they could not explain. So you have to ask what, whatever happened to science? Whatever happened to that spirit of inquiry and fascination with the enigmas of the world. You know, Cassini saw an object with his telescope. And in those days of course, he was director of Paris Observatory, he did not publish his first observation because as a scientist he exercised restraint in an observation that he had made only once. But then he saw the same thing again a few years later and then he published both observations. And that’s what science is all about. And you have to wonder how science has become this bureaucratic constipated thing that is rejecting this phenomenon today. What are they afraid of, you know?
Alan Steinfeld
Well what are they afraid of that you think? What’s going on with science? Are they covering up for governments? What do you think?
Jacques Valleé
No, I think I work with scientists all the time. I was trained in science. I think I know what kind of atmosphere they live in. It has become a very bureaucratic atmosphere where you go from one proposal and one series of researches to another, looking for incremental improvements in knowledge. And of course that’s where a lot of good science is done. But this is a phenomenon that is not good for your reputation because it’s not an incremental thing. It challenges too many ideas at the same time. And also the observations are not coming through the normal channels of science. They’re not coming from observatories in most cases, or only as anecdotes. But they’re not coming from laboratories. We don’t have any, well, we do have a few pieces of hardware that have been picked up after, on the site, for example, of a close encounter. And those are very interesting, and I certainly have published my own analyses of that. But we don’t have something that is completely convincing as a, you know, as an alien artifact.
Alan Steinfeld
What about the SETI project, this Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence? You know, are there science-based? Have they not… are you aware of them having seen something? Are they just totally blind to something like this happening?
Jacques Valleé
Most of the scientists involved in SETI, which by the way is a very worthwhile effort, of course we should be able to pick up signals from nearby stars, if not from the rest of the universe, that would indicate the presence of intelligence. And we don’t. And that also has to be explained at some point. But they’re not looking for things right here in the Earth’s environment, and UFOs are a proximity phenomenon as you can see from the Wonders in the Sky, from the book that Chris and I have assembled. These are in the immediate surroundings of the witness. And that’s not what SETI is looking at. SETI is looking for far away electromagnetic signals. So they are two totally theoretically and intellectually, the two topics are obviously linked, but that’s not their mission. I think their mission is to look at different things.
Alan Steinfeld
Do you give any credibility to crop circles as a valid evidence of something unknown, or?
Jacques Valleé
I’ve looked at several series of crop circles. I met people who are hoaxers who are, actually are artists who were creating crop circles, and regarding this as a manifestation of art. I think that there is one hypothesis that has been ignored, which is that these are military electronic developments, testing beams from hovering platforms, not from satellites, but from hovering platforms, simply as a calibration experiment. Of course, these beams would be designed to fight certain military threats and not designed to just damage a corn field. But during this period of the last 20 years, you can see how the quality of the beam has been improved and the complexity of the patterns, and I think to me that that indicates a human experiment.
Alan Steinfeld
Yeah, it could be, or I mean it could be a developmental abstract language. We’re being, that’s being unfolded. I mean I don’t know it’s.
Jacques Valleé
Well all the patterns are human patterns, including the Mandelbrot set. Fractals are a human invention, they look wonderful, and indeed almost paranormal in their beauty and complexity, but you know we can display them on a computer screen and anything you can display on a computer screen you could beam out to a hovering platform and with the right beam you could imprint it on a corn field. So think of every stalk of corn as a pixel. That’s how you calibrate a beam. And if you ask me why would anybody want to do that, I can give you several military threats where you would need a beam of that type rather than a classic weapon.
Alan Steinfeld
A beam of, what type of beam would it be that would do this type of work?
Jacques Valleé
It seems to be, it’s not a single radiation, in other words, it’s not just a laser. It seems to be a combination of an infrared beam with microwaves.
Alan Steinfeld
And we have that kind of technology to do that? That you’re…?
Jacques Valleé
Oh yes. Oh yes. Yes. And in fact, that kind of weapon development has now been published. The fact that that kind of beam existed. It has not been linked to a crop circles specifically, but there were several articles recently in, you know, within a year, in New Scientist, for example, talking about the development of that kind of beam.
Alan Steinfeld
Alright, let’s going back to the unexplained aerial phenomena, you make a very important point to separate observation from interpretation. And that’s key in the cases that you look at here, but do you see any kind of progression in the phenomena itself, development of different types of crafts. Of course there are different types of crafts, but is there a movement and evolution to what is being seen in the sky from the overall analysis that you’ve looked at?
Jacques Valleé
I would have to say no. And that itself is has been very surprising to Chris and myself. By the way, Chris is an Englishman who lives in Madrid. He’s a student of philology, a student of language and history. He is very much a scholar of this area and he’s amassing an enormous quantity of material that he’s documenting extremely well. And we see this book as just the beginning. We want to encourage scholars, historians, not ufologists at this point, but we need people who go through collections of museums, people who go through collections of manuscripts, inviting them to call to our attention anything that would fit within this category. We have 500 cases, unexplained, from antiquity to 1879, when there was no airplane in the sky, no dirigibles, no CIA, no U2, no prototypes. And the patterns are very much, as far as I can tell, the same patterns we have for modern UFOs. In other words, we have devices, physical devices, there seems to be a technology at work. That technology can manifest as in the form of light. There are beings associated with it. There are paranormal effects on the witnesses sometimes, not all the time. And the patterns, the last part of the book is a series of statistics. really asking the hard questions about comparing the patterns of the ancient phenomenon with the modern phenomenon. And I haven’t found systematic differences. They are described in different terms, because language has changed, obviously history, communication patterns, publication patterns, all of that has changed from one century to the next. But when you strip that out, you’re left with a phenomenon that seems to be pretty constant, which is, which is curious, because technology changes. You know, we don’t drive the same kind of car we were driving 50 years ago.
Alan Steinfeld
Right, so how would we, I mean, one way to explain it that these, whoever these things are, they’re so far in advance that they’ve already reached a level of change and they’ve optimized their these vehicles or whatever these are. I mean, that’s one way to explain it. How would you explain the fact that this phenomenon has not changed?
Jacques Valleé
Well, if you, at this point, if you allow me to do a little bit of science fiction, you could say they come from time. Maybe all these incidents are happening within, you know, one week of their time. We just see them over 3000 years. You know, I’m not seriously saying this. But we have to look at an idea of expanded dimensions here.
Alan Steinfeld
Yeah. Well, if we look at expanded dimensions, how do we understand the extra factor of that question of consciousness? And obviously, what we’ve been told about consciousness isn’t true. There’s a spiritual, in a way, revolution I feel happening around the world that’s questioning what is consciousness. So how does consciousness relate to multiple dimensions? Do we interact with these hypotheses? It doesn’t have to be scientific.
Jacques Valleé
I have, the signal has been breaking up. I didn’t understand your question there. The signal has been breaking up. Maybe interferences from Jupiter or something.
Alan Steinfeld
Oh sorry. Right, thank you from somebody. But I’m just saying, I mean if we talk about multi-dimensions we have to understand consciousness in a different way, and how do you just hypothesize about an understanding of consciousness in a sort of multi-dimensional capacity? Do you have any ideas of an explanation about that?
Jacques Valleé
You know the people who have done remote viewing experiments in parapsychology have noticed something very interesting. You know in remote viewing typically you send somebody out to random places that are selected by a random number generator and then the so called psychic or the person doing the experiment is in a closed room and describes where the outgoing person is located. And then the two descriptions are compared by a judge and you see whether they coincide. That’s the classic remote viewing experiment. The problem is that if you do the experiment today about where the person is going to be tomorrow, it seems to work just as well. So that means that consciousness can not only reach across space, but it can reach across time. And that is pretty well established now in parapsychology, and that’s one of course one of the most interesting developments in remote viewing in the last 10 or 15 years. That was one of the findings of the Stanford Research Institute, and it was duplicated by many other laboratories, many other scientists. That has to pose the question of what exactly is human consciousness and what kind of dimensionality does it exist in?
Alan Steinfeld
Do you have any theories about that? Because I mean, just to play with, not that it has to be scientific fact, but any ideas of how you can explain a consciousness in that way?
Jacques Valleé
Well, you know, no I cannot explain it. And one of the reasons I sort of dropped out of physics after my PhD is that I could never believe what modern physics is saying about time. Modern physics says that well you can just, we have these three dimensions of space, you know, x, y, and z, and that’s all fine and dandy. And then time you just treat it as another dimension, you put an ‘i’ for the imaginary constant or imaginary number in front of it and then you treat it as another dimension but you can only go one way. Well, what kind of a dimension is that? I mean this is mathematically elegant but physically it really doesn’t mean anything. And so you manipulate the equations and the equations work and you know I don’t have any problem with that. But it, there’s got to be something else, you know, come on. There’s got to be something larger. And parapsychology tells us that time can move both ways, and that the present is overdetermined. If the present is overdetermined, which is also what some ancient philosophies were saying, then it’s a whole different ballgame, and it says that really we could do a theory of physics without any dimensions. We don’t really need dimensions. You need dimensions when you do engineering. If you’re going to invent a steam engine, or do thermodynamics, or that kind of thing, you know it’s very convenient to have dimensions so that you can measure energy, you can measure displacement, you can measure work and all those good things. But to do a theory of the entire universe, you could do it in other ways. And maybe both the UFO phenomenon and parapsychology are really telling us that it’s time to think in different ways.
Alan Steinfeld
Well I interviewed a guy named David Anderson recently, do you know his work?
Jacques Valleé
No, I don’t.
Alan Steinfeld
You might really enjoy him. He’s created a time warp generator where he says he can manipulate the quality of time and actually send things back in time. It’s on my website. I’ll send you a link and I’m also going to put on a conference where lots of people can come together and present papers about time. I’m hoping to do that this summer outside of Palm Springs.
Jacques Valleé
That would be great.
Alan Steinfeld
Yeah, maybe you could be part of that conference. Timelines and Hyperspace is something I’d like to discuss with you know, real science. But I’ll send you the link to this guy David Anderson and he’s quite a genius and he’s coming up with some new ideas about the nature of time. There’s so much that we don’t know about just the world and I think like this book shows these aerial phenomena are still a mystery 3000 years later and we have a lot to learn obviously.
Jacques Valleé
Yes, indeed.
Alan Steinfeld
But have you noticed when you did this research whether patterns of their appearance, do they appear like towards the beginning years of a century or the first couple of years of a decade or certain years? And of course you highlight certain countries because you had researchers, but did you, what patterns popped out at you when you were looking at all these cases?
Jacques Valleé
Actually, we don’t have enough cases to do statistics and to look at the overall patterns of the phenomenon. I don’t think we have enough to look at periodicity in the ancient eras. And as you may know from my previous books, I’ve looked for periodicity in the over the last century or so. And there we do have enough data, it seems to be a pattern of a schedule of reinforcement. In other words, there are bunches of sightings coming in waves, but it’s a pseudo-random pattern. It’s not a periodic pattern, as far as I can tell. Of course, we also know that we only get one case in 10 or 20 in the Western world, and of course even less in Africa and Asia and other places. So we may not have rich enough data to truly prove any kind of periodicity. So I’m open-minded on those, but I’m a little bit skeptical.
Alan Steinfeld
Well, are you following what’s happening this year, 2010, there’s been an amazing rash of sightings, wouldn’t you agree?
Jacques Valleé
Yes, but how many of those have been investigated? Because we know that if a case is reported on the internet 90% or 95% of the time we’re going to find a natural explanation. And so I prefer to deal with older cases that have more authority to them. By the way, we’re well aware Chris and I that some people would say, well the older cases are vague and so on because they come to us through many layers of history. And that’s really not the case. I mean, these cases are, if anything, better documented than modern cases. For example, in the Roman Empire the consuls in Rome had made a law that there had to be a report every year of unexplained phenomena in the sky. This was of course for astrological reasons, because they believed that unexplained things in the sky would announce human events, wars and famine and revolutions and the death of emperors and so on. And, you know, it’s a little bit as if President Obama called the Air Force and said I demand a quarterly report on my desk on all the UFOs that you’re tracking. And wouldn’t that be wonderful? Now many of those records have been lost, but they were reproduced, they were copied by historians, and many of them have come down, down to us. Of course astronomers are delighted at this because many of these cases were comets and meteors, and that enables you to look at periodicity of celestial events way back to the Roman Empire. The period of Halley’s comet and everything else. But there are a number of cases that are truly unexplained today, that are not comets and meteors and the aurora or tornadoes or anything like that. And those are the cases that we’ve recorded, and they were official records of the Roman Empire. The same thing in Egypt, the same thing in Russia, with records of the church. These are cases that were very carefully recorded for history to remember them.
Alan Steinfeld
Well, yeah, and you talk about China, Japan. I believe that those were real events that were not made up for somebody’s popularity but were royal reports like you say. So when you look at all this stuff, you know, humans like to make meaning. They like to create hypotheses. There must be, and I won’t hold you to this, but there must be some ideas that you fantasize or create about why these things are here, what do they want? I mean of course it’s a guess, but I’m just curious what comes to you after all these years of studying this, you must have some ideas that occur. I’m just curious what they would be.
Jacques Valleé
Let me say two things here. First, yes, those cases and we’ve highlighted this in the book, were interpreted in the context of the time, which is why we take the trouble to have in every chapter a prologue and an epilogue describing communication patterns, religious patterns, what happened in science in that particular era or period and so on, because that influenced the interpretation that people gave of those objects, very often in a religious context. People in the Middle Ages thought they were seeing devils or angels or whatever, depending on their context. But they did not make it up, the phenomenon was actually there. So that’s one part. To answer your second question, if they’re not from the Earth, and of course it could represent a sort of unknown species that lives right here, sort of a shadow biosphere, people are looking at that seriously now. But if you assume they come from the outside, then they know that we’re bound to explore them at some point. And when we find out how it works, we will be able to duplicate it, just to put to put a fine point on this. When I was going to to school, to college, the idea of an anti-gravity machine, or of going to space without rockets was completely absurd and was rejected as impossible physically. Well, there are a number of theories right now that are making it possible. We have the theories. They may not be practical in terms of engineering, but the physics is there. The concepts, the advanced mathematical concepts are there. So it’s only a matter of time before we try to implement them. The problem with physics, modern physics is that to do those things you need the mass of a star. In order to curve space time to the point where you could duplicate a UFO phenomenon you literally would need negative energy that is equivalent to the mass of Jupiter. Well we don’t know how to do that, so we sort of abandon it and go back to doing normal physics. But these objects, whether it’s the one that Cassini saw or the ones I’ve seen, are not carrying around the mass of Jupiter. They’re small. They’re 30 feet to 150 feet or whatever it is they don’t carry the mass of a star. So whoever built them or whoever sent them has found a way around what we consider a sort of limit to physical reality today. Or they’ve taken a shortcut. My personal conviction as a computer scientist, as an information scientist, is that we have essentially two pillars for modern physics right now. We have energy and we have mass. We have thermodynamics and we have gravity. That’s essentially it. They are trying to merge it and that’s not working, but they are trying hard, string theory and so on. But they are leaving out the third pillar, which is information. A lot of the things that the phenomenon demonstrates have to do with the manipulation of information.
Alan Steinfeld
And how is that going to affect what physics creates in a way by understanding information, is that what you’re saying?
Jacques Valleé
Well if physics ever includes information to the point of being a third pillar of what it does, then it will open up physics again to human consciousness. Because consciousness is information.
Alan Steinfeld
And that would create these shifts.
Jacques Valleé
And that would create totally different hypotheses. And also the capability to duplicate that phenomena and perhaps eventually to contact the people who are creating hypotheses.
Alan Steinfeld
I’ll have to break… I appreciate your time. Is there anything, I’ve been talking to Jacques Vallee, the co-author of this book Wonders in the Sky with Chris Aubeck. Is there any ideas or things you would like to leave the listeners with?
Jacques Valleé
Well, simply that this is the beginning of a study. It’s in many ways it’s a generation transition because Chris is a new voice in this field of research and he will go on to write many more books. We see this as a beginning, as a signal to again to scholars, historians, people who have access to collections of older documents, of course written in language that requires a specialist to translate them, to start helping us with the cases that they encounter. We know there’s got to be a lot more material available in museums and in libraries and so on, and we hope that people will become involved, including people in Japan, China, other places where we didn’t have as good access.
Alan Steinfeld
Yeah, we really do need a scientific openness to investigate what you’ve started in this book. Wonders in the Sky, Unexplained Aerial Objects from Antiquity to Modern Times. Thank you Jacques, I really appreciate your time.
Jacques Valleé
Thank you very much, Alan, I enjoyed it. Thanks.
Alan Steinfeld
Okay, I’ve been talking to Jacques Valleé, noted researcher in the field of UFOs about this new book that’s just come out from Penguin Tarcher. I recommended it’s an amazing compilation of unexplained aerial phenomena, and each case is very interesting, detailed, so get a copy. You’ve been listening to New Realities with Alan Steinfeld. If you want to reach me, email me at newrealities@earthlink.net and check my website at newrealities.com. Thank you for listening.