Jacques Vallée

Jacques Vallée (b. 1939) is a French-born astrophysicist, computer scientist, and venture capitalist whose continuous involvement in UAP research since the early 1960s makes him one of the longest-standing scientifically-credentialed observers of the field. ^[1]

Vallée began his career at the Paris Observatory and was on the team at the University of Texas that produced the first computer-based map of Mars for NASA. He later worked on the ARPANET — the predecessor of the modern internet — and was a principal investigator on Doug Engelbart's group at the Stanford Research Institute. ^[2] He has spent the bulk of his subsequent career as a venture capitalist, including as a general partner of the Paris-based fund SBV Capital, while continuing UAP research as an independent program.

Vallée's UAP work is distinguished by two strands: extensive personal investigation of physical-trace cases (including the 1965 Valensole, France landing and the 1979 Trans-en-Provence case), and his 1969 book Passport to Magonia, which advanced the controlversial argument that modern UAP reports share structural features with pre-modern folklore traditions. ^[3] He was the real-world model for the character of Claude Lacombe (played by François Truffaut) in Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind. ^[4] His personal archive of 1960s–1970s case files is held at Rice University and forms one of the primary research collections for UAP historians.