Forbidden Science 3

About the Author

Jacques Vallée is a French-born computer scientist, venture capitalist and astronomer who has been an active UFO researcher since the early 1960s. He worked on the ARPANET, took a doctorate in computer science, and spent his professional life in Silicon Valley technology investment while conducting UFO research privately and largely at his own expense. The dual career is not a biographical curiosity; it is the reason his journals exist and the reason they are worth reading.

His published arguments are elsewhere. Passport to Magonia (1969) proposed the continuity between UFO reports and folklore encounter traditions; The Invisible College (1975) argued for a control-system reading of the phenomenon; Messengers of Deception (1979) turned toward the manipulation of belief. The journals are the raw material those books were quarried from, and they show the arguments being formed rather than delivered.

The decade this volume covers is the one in which his two books Dimensions (1988) and Confrontations (1990) were researched and written. Reading the journals alongside those books is unusually instructive: the fieldwork in Brazil and Argentina that produced Confrontations' physiological-effects cases appears here as it happened, before Vallée knew what he would make of it.

The series structure is worth understanding. Forbidden Science (1992) covered 1957–1969; Forbidden Science 2: California Hermetica covered 1970–1979; this volume covers 1980–1989; and Forbidden Science 4: The Spring Hill Chronicles covers 1990–1999. Volumes 2, 3 and 4 all appeared from Anomalist Books between 2017 and 2019, which means Vallée released three decades of private material into a very different public environment from the one in which it was written.

A caution that applies to the whole series: these are edited journals. Vallée selected what to publish and when, thirty years after the fact, with full knowledge of who was later discredited and which controversies had gone which way. The entries are contemporaneous; the selection is not. Nothing in the volume lets a reader see what was left out.

Historical Context & Origins

The 1980s were the decade in which the American UFO research community was, in a documented and now largely undisputed sense, deliberately poisoned. The central episode is the operation run against Albuquerque businessman Paul Bennewitz, who had been monitoring anomalous signals and lights near Kirtland Air Force Base. Air Force Office of Special Investigations agent Richard Doty and others fed Bennewitz fabricated material about underground alien bases; Bennewitz's mental health collapsed under it, and the fabrications entered the wider literature and never left.

The second great contamination of the decade was the MJ-12 documents. In 1987 William Moore, Jaime Shandera and Stanton Friedman circulated papers purporting to describe a high-level committee overseeing recovered extraterrestrial material. The National Archives, the FBI and the Air Force have all rejected them; Vallée rejected them at the time. Their circulation nevertheless reoriented a substantial part of the field toward a crashed-saucer-and-cover-up narrative that has dominated it ever since.

Moore's own role complicates the picture in a way this volume is directly relevant to. Moore later acknowledged cooperating with intelligence contacts, and has claimed publicly that J. Allen Hynek and Vallée were themselves government assets — an accusation Vallée has always rejected. A journal kept through those years by one of the accused is, whatever else it is, a document in that dispute.

Against that backdrop the decade also produced the single best physical-trace case in the literature. On January 8, 1981 Renato Nicolai watched an object he described as two plates glued together at the rim land briefly in his garden at Trans-en-Provence in southeastern France. France's official investigating body, GEPAN, conducted the most rigorous physical and botanical analysis ever performed on a UFO landing site, and this site examines it in its own case file. Vallée's French connections put him unusually close to that work.

The decade's other notable episodes recur through the journals: the Hudson Valley wave of 1982–86 with its thousands of witnesses to a large boomerang formation; the Cash-Landrum injury case of December 1980 and its unresolved litigation; and, at the very end of the decade, the beginnings of the Gulf Breeze controversy.

The professional half of Vallée's life is the volume's other spine, and it is not filler. The 1980s were when American venture capital became the dominant mechanism for funding technological change, and Vallée was inside that transition. His observations about how capital, secrecy and institutional credibility interact are informed by direct experience in an industry that runs on precisely those things, which makes his scepticism about the UFO field's own funding and patronage structures better grounded than the usual.

One more contextual fact shapes how the book reads. It was published in 2017, months before the New York Times AATIP story broke and the subject re-entered official respectability. Vallée released a decade's worth of documentation about how the field had been manipulated at the precise moment a new generation was about to be told to take official interest at face value. The timing may be coincidental. It is certainly convenient.

Core Arguments & Key Concepts

The manipulation was real, deliberate and effective, and it worked because the field wanted to be manipulated. This is the volume's controlling observation and the reason it is the most important of the four. Vallée's contemporaneous entries record him watching researchers accept documents and testimony that flattered their existing beliefs, from sources whose interest in flattering them was obvious. The disinformation succeeded not because it was sophisticated but because its targets were receptive.

A contemporaneous record is a different kind of evidence from a memoir. The entire evidential claim of the Forbidden Science series rests on this. A journal entry written in 1983 about a meeting in 1983 cannot be reshaped by what was learned in 1993 — it can only be omitted. This makes the volumes uniquely useful for reconstructing what was actually known, and by whom, at each point in a controversy whose participants have all since revised their accounts.

The physical-trace evidence was the field's best asset and it was abandoned for documents. The decade offered Trans-en-Provence: an official investigation, soil and plant analysis, measurable effects, a named witness, published in the peer-reviewable literature. The field's attention went instead to photocopied memoranda of unknown provenance. Vallée's frustration at this reallocation runs through the volume and it is entirely justified.

South American fieldwork was systematically undervalued. Vallée's investigations in Brazil and Argentina during these years — the material that would become Confrontations — produced injury and physiological-effect cases with medical documentation that the North American literature has never matched. His argument that the field's geographic parochialism cost it its best physical evidence is one of the more durable criticisms in the whole series.

Secrecy corrupts research even when there is nothing to hide. One of the volume's subtler themes is that the structure of classified work — compartmentalisation, unverifiable sourcing, deniability — degrades the epistemics of anyone operating near it, regardless of whether any real secret exists. A researcher who accepts information he cannot check from a source he cannot name has already stopped doing research, and the 1980s turned much of ufology into exactly that.

Belief systems are engineered, and the engineering is observable. The strand that connects this volume to Messengers of Deception. Vallée's position is not that the phenomenon is fake but that the narratives around it are cultivated, sometimes by state actors and sometimes by entrepreneurs, and that a researcher's first job is to distinguish the signal from the cultivation. He rarely claims to have succeeded at this.

The book's weakest feature is its author's presence in it. Vallée is scathing about colleagues, protective of his own priority, and sometimes visibly annoyed at being less famous than researchers he considers less careful. Readers have noticed. This is a real limitation on the volume as testimony — a diary is a record of what its author thought, including what he thought unfairly.

Key Cases & Evidence Discussed

Trans-en-Provence, January 8, 1981. Renato Nicolai's account of a bulging disc, described as two plates joined at the rim, landing in his garden with a faint whistling sound; the physical traces; and GEPAN's soil and vegetation analysis, the most rigorous work of its kind ever done. Covered in this site's case file.

The Bennewitz operation. The feeding of fabricated material to Paul Bennewitz by Richard Doty and others, its effect on Bennewitz personally, and its permanent contamination of the underground-base literature. Vallée's contemporaneous view of what was happening, recorded while it was happening.

The MJ-12 documents, 1987. The circulation of the purported Majestic 12 papers, Vallée's immediate scepticism, and the subsequent division of the field into those who accepted them and those who did not — a division that has outlived nearly everyone involved.

The Aviary and the disinformation network. The loose set of intelligence-adjacent figures who circulated through UFO research in the late 1980s under bird code names, and the persistent question of who was informing whom. Vallée's journals record encounters from inside that milieu without resolving it.

The Cash–Landrum incident and its aftermath. The December 1980 injury case in Texas and the litigation that followed, examined in this site's case file — the strongest American physical-effects claim of the decade and one that ended without resolution.

The Hudson Valley wave, 1982–1986. Thousands of reports of a large, slow, silent boomerang formation over New York and Connecticut, treated in this site's case file. A mass-witness event running concurrently with the documentary controversies and receiving a fraction of the attention.

The South American fieldwork. Vallée's investigative travel in Brazil and Argentina, gathering the physiological-effect and injury cases that would become Confrontations. Some of the most substantive original research in the volume and the least discussed.

The venture capital years. The professional strand: Vallée inside the emergence of modern Silicon Valley finance, and the observations about capital, secrecy and institutional credibility that inform his UFO scepticism.

Critical Reception & Controversies

The book received no mainstream review, which is normal for the series and for its publisher. Anomalist Books is a small specialist house; the print run is modest; the audience is people who already read Vallée. Its reception is therefore almost entirely within the field, where it is well regarded.

Reader ratings are strong — the volume sits around four and a half stars across a small number of ratings on the main reader platforms — and the substantive praise consistently identifies the same virtue: that the entries were written before anyone knew the outcomes. Jeffrey Kripal of Rice University, quoted by the publisher on the series generally, credits Vallée with teaching readers something serious about Western esotericism, folklore, science fiction and the reality of paranormal phenomena.

The most interesting criticism comes from readers who admire Vallée. The recurring objection to this volume specifically is that the diarist has become less generous than in earlier decades: dismissive of colleagues, quick to attribute bad faith, and notably hostile to Budd Hopkins and the abduction researchers. At least one detailed reader review argues that the accumulating self-regard damages the volume as testimony, while still conceding Vallée's intellectual stature.

That criticism is fair and it should be weighed rather than dismissed. But it also cuts the other way. Vallée's contempt for the abduction paradigm in the 1980s, expressed privately at the time, was substantially vindicated by the subsequent collapse of hypnotic regression as an evidential technique. A diary that records unpopular judgements which later proved right is more valuable, not less, for having recorded them ungraciously.

The sharper structural criticism is about editorial control. These are edited journals, published thirty years late by an author with a settled view of who was right. Nothing lets a reader see what was cut, and the entries that survive are, unsurprisingly, the ones that read well in hindsight. Vallée does include material that reflects poorly on himself, which is a point in his favour, but the selection remains his.

There is also the Moore accusation, which no honest account can omit. William Moore has publicly claimed that Hynek and Vallée were government assets. Vallée denies it, and no evidence has ever been produced. But the accusation exists, it comes from someone who has admitted his own cooperation with intelligence contacts, and readers of this volume should hold it in view while reading a self-authored record of the same period.

Within the series the consensus ranking puts the original 1992 volume first for historical importance and this one second for consequence. Volume 2 is the most personal, volume 4 the most institutionally revealing about the 1990s, and volume 3 the one that documents the decade in which the field's evidential standards broke.

Influence & Legacy

The series' cumulative effect has been to make the internal history of UFO research reconstructible. Almost every other account of the 1980s disinformation era was written retrospectively by participants with reputations to defend. A contemporaneous diary, even a curated one, is a different order of source, and historians of the subject now routinely date and cross-check against these volumes.

This volume in particular underwrites the modern consensus that the Bennewitz operation happened, that MJ-12 was a fabrication, and that a meaningful portion of 1980s ufology was shaped by people who were not researching anything. That consensus took thirty years to form, and Vallée held the position from the beginning.

Its methodological legacy is the case for physical evidence over documents. Vallée's insistence through the 1980s that Trans-en-Provence mattered more than any photocopied memorandum was a minority view at the time and is close to orthodoxy now among researchers who take the subject seriously. The current official interest in instrumented sensor data rather than testimony is the same argument in a new idiom.

The cautionary legacy is the one Vallée most wants readers to take. A community that cannot distinguish information from cultivation can be steered by anyone willing to cultivate it, and being steered feels exactly like discovering something. The 1980s are the field's best-documented demonstration of that, and the fact that this book was published in 2017 — on the eve of a new wave of official-source revelations that a new generation was invited to accept at face value — gives it a pointedness its author may or may not have intended.

The Book

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