Jacques Vallee

Biography & Timeline

Jacques Vallée is best known in this vault as a UFO theorist, but that is the smaller half of his life. He spent roughly four years as a professional astronomer and then some sixty as a computer scientist and venture capitalist. His doctorate — routinely described, including in his own 2003 paper, as being in astronomy — is in fact in information retrieval. His dated employment record is held as atomic notes under time-based-notes/; this page is the narrative.

Astronomy, 1961–1963

Vallée read mathematics at the University of Paris and took the equivalent of an MS in astrophysics at Lille. By 1961 he was a government scientist at the Paris Observatory on the artificial-satellites project, and on the theoretical study of a classified radar-alert defence project. In 1962 he moved to the United States as a research associate under Gérard de Vaucouleurs at McDonald Observatory, where he worked on what became NASA's first detailed map of Mars.

Northwestern and Hynek, 1963–1967

J. Allen Hynek found him a programming job at Northwestern's Technological Institute. The two co-authored a 1966 paper in Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific whose affiliation line is the hard evidence for the post. Northwestern awarded his doctorate in June 1967 for Search Strategies and Retrieval Languages.

It was here, in 1967, that Vallée found the Pentacle memo while organising Hynek's Project Blue Book files. He discovered that document; he did not write it — see the correction on that note.

Computing, 1969–1976

After brief posts at Shell and the RCA Service Company, Vallée managed information systems at the Stanford University Computer Center, then in 1971 joined Douglas Engelbart's Augmentation Research Center at SRI as a senior research engineer.

[!warning] Two claims about this period are weaker than they look Vallée's own biography states that he implemented the first ARPANET Network Information Center with Elizabeth "Jake" Feinler. This is self-reported and uncorroborated — third-party histories of Feinler do not mention him.

His presence at SRI is also routinely conflated with SRI's remote viewing program. He worked in Engelbart's ARC, a different unit. What is documented is that he was intermittently consulted on classified remote viewing research through friendships with Hal Puthoff and Kit Green, who obtained a temporary clearance for him in 1974 — observation and consultation, not program membership.

At the Institute for the Future from 1972 he succeeded Paul Baran as principal investigator on a computer-networking project and built the PLANET and FORUM conferencing systems, spun out in 1976 as InfoMedia Corporation.

Venture capital, 1982–present

A declassified CIA roster dated October 1985 records him as "Vice President, International Operations, Sofinnova, Inc.; Co-Founder, Infomedia Corporation; Former Research Fellow, Institute for the Future" — one document fixing three employers. He went on to co-found Euro-America Ventures, to partner in Sigefi, Burnette & Vallée (evidenced by an SEC filing he signed personally), and to co-found NASA's Red Planet Capital.

UAP institutional record

Vallée coined and chronicled the Invisible College. He sat on the NIDS science advisory board from its first meeting in February 1996, and by October 2003 was a "consulting member" — the affiliation under which he and Eric Davis published the Six-Level Model.

He was not on the Condon Committee: the complete staff roster in Appendix X of the Condon Report was retrieved and read, and he is not on it. He was not at the founding meeting of the ATP working group either, though his journals are the best record of its later sessions.

Full career research report