Forbidden Science 4

About the Author

This site's own Jacques Vallée key-figures entry and its existing article on Forbidden Science 2: California Hermetica already document his full biography in depth; this article does not repeat that ground. The book's own back-cover copy, personally reviewed for this article directly from the publisher's product page, describes him plainly as presently "a venture capitalist living in San Francisco" -- the same Silicon Valley professional throughline his earlier journal volumes establish, continued unbroken into the 1990s.

This is the fourth of what this article's own research confirms is now a completed six-volume series: Volume 1, A Passion for Discovery (1957-1969); Volume 2, California Hermetica (1970-1979), already covered on this site; Volume 3, On the Trail of Hidden Truths (1980-1989), not yet covered on this site; this volume (1990-1999); and two later volumes this article's research surfaced as new information beyond what any prior article on this site anticipated -- Volume 5, Pacific Heights (2000-2009), and Volume 6, Scattered Castles (2010-2019), the latter explicitly marketed as the series' closing installment, bringing the full project to roughly forty years of contemporaneous journals across six volumes and, by one secondary estimate, more than 2,000 pages.

Historical Context & Origins

Per the publisher's own back-cover description, this volume is bookended by two cases still unexplained today: a 1990 field study of UFO close encounters in the USSR, and the Haravilliers mystery in France at the decade's end. Between those two poles, the same description states, Vallée "studied dozens of remarkable events yielding veridical data analyzed in the laboratory," during what the back cover frames as a period when "scientists were finally able to study UFOs with adequate resources."

This article's own research was not able to confirm that the diary directly discusses COMETA -- the French report prepared by retired generals, scientists, and officials and released in July 1999, the same year this volume's coverage ends -- by name, or records any meetings with its authors. No publisher description, academic review, or bookseller copy surfaced any such reference. This site's own case-file citation is, and should be read as, comparative rather than direct: Vallée's journals document the same nine-year French and international research milieu that produced COMETA, from an independent vantage point, rather than an insider account of the report's own drafting.

The title's specific meaning was harder to pin down than the site's existing Volume 2 article found for that book's "California Hermetica" subtitle: the clearest description this article located treats "Spring Hill" as one of the diary's own dated, place-based section headers rather than a phrase carrying deeper symbolic weight -- a tentative reading this article flags as based on a single secondary source rather than a directly verified quotation from the text itself.

Core Arguments & Key Concepts

As with Volume 2, this is a chronological diary rather than an argument-driven book, and its evidentiary value lies in the same contemporaneous, dated-entry immediacy: impressions of meetings, cases, and institutional access recorded close to the time they occurred rather than reconstructed decades later from memory.

The volume's throughline, per its own back-cover framing, is behind-the-scenes access to institutions rather than to any single case: the National Institute for Discovery Science boardroom (Robert Bigelow's paranormal-research institute, founded 1995), meetings with congressmen and intelligence officials, and the closed sessions of the Rockefeller Initiative, Laurance Rockefeller's 1990s push for UFO-disclosure policy -- a decade in which, unusually, Vallée's journals suggest scientific UFO study finally had meaningful institutional resources behind it, for better and for worse.

Key Cases & Evidence Discussed

This site's own COMETA Report Context case file (Case File #124) documents the July 1999 French report prepared by a group of retired generals, scientists, and officials -- known formally as the Comité d'études approfondies -- and its own significance within the wider landscape of government-adjacent UFO study efforts. That case file cites this volume alongside Leslie Kean's UFOs: Generals, Pilots, and Government Officials Go on the Record, Swords and Powell's UFOs and Government: A Historical Inquiry, and Richard Dolan's UFOs for the 21st Century Mind -- a shelf of comparative works this site's own research treats this volume as one part of, not a primary source on COMETA specifically.

This article's own research was not able to independently verify further detail on either bookend case the back-cover copy names -- the 1990 USSR close-encounter field study or the Haravilliers mystery -- beyond the publisher's own brief description; neither appears to have its own dedicated case file on this site at present.

Critical Reception & Controversies

On Goodreads, the book holds a 4.35-out-of-5 average from 26 ratings and 2 written reviews (checked August 2026, directly verified for this article). One reviewer called it "a fascinating look at the life of one of the most intriguing academics of our age... almost essential reading" for readers already familiar with Vallée's work; a second five-star review nonetheless described the diaries as revealing Vallée "full of contradictions, of superficial judgment" in places -- a notably more mixed assessment than its own star rating implies, and this article reports both readings rather than only the more flattering one.

This article's own research was not able to retrieve an Amazon customer rating directly, consistent with the bot-detection barrier this site's own research previously encountered attempting the same for Forbidden Science 2; per this site's Amazon Rating Display Protocol, that gap is disclosed here rather than estimated.

More substantively, physicist and military-paranormal-research figure John B. Alexander reviewed the volume in the Journal of Scientific Exploration (Vol. 33, Issue 3, September 2019), calling it "an excellent compendium of contemporaneous notes" -- a citable scholarly assessment this article treats as more weighty than the small sample of consumer reviews above.

Influence & Legacy

With the series now complete at six volumes -- a fact this article's own research surfaced as new information -- this fourth installment sits at the project's midpoint: the hinge between the earlier, more personal volumes covering Vallée's formative decades and the later Pacific Heights and Scattered Castles volumes covering his most institutionally connected years. No single retrospective source reviewing the completed six-volume series as a whole was found during this research; what exists are per-volume assessments this article's own research had to synthesize rather than quote from an existing overview piece.

Set alongside this site's own COMETA Report Context case file, this volume's chief value is comparative: a contemporaneous, independently-sourced account of the same nine-year French and international research climate that produced COMETA, offered by a researcher with direct personal standing in that same milieu but no documented involvement in the report itself.

The Book

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