Key figures
The computer scientist and author who argued for a broader view of the phenomenon. 21 events, newest first.
Select any year above to see what happened that year.
Open Jacques Vallee as a timeline
Whistleblowers24 Oct 2025
The Sol Foundation held its third UAP symposium on the shores of Lake Maggiore in northern Italy, October 24-27, 2025. Listed speakers included Karl Nell, Jacques Vallee, Garry Nolan, Tim Gallaudet, Beatriz Villarroel and Jake Barber.
Photo: Killarnee, CC BY-SA 4.0
Whistleblowers22 Nov 2024
The Sol Foundation, a UAP think tank founded by Stanford academics, held its second annual symposium on Nov. 22-23, 2024. Speakers included former NOAA head Tim Gallaudet, a former Senate Armed Services staffer, and scientists Garry Nolan, Avi Loeb and Jacques Vallee.
MediaJan 2022
Garry Nolan, Jacques Vallee, Sizun Jiang and Larry Lemke published a paper in Progress in Aerospace Sciences on isotopic and other instrumental methods for characterizing unusual materials, framed as potentially relevant to what the authors call aerospace forensics.
Media6 Oct 2020
James Fox's documentary, narrated by Peter Coyote, surveyed UFO cases since the 1940s alongside the newly released Navy videos. It featured former Senate leader Harry Reid, ex-New Mexico governor Bill Richardson and researcher Jacques Vallee. It was released for digital download.
Photo: OldDominionVA89, CC BY-SA 4.0
Media28 Oct 2010
Jacques Vallee and Chris Aubeck published Wonders in the Sky, a sourced catalog of more than 500 aerial-anomaly reports from antiquity through 1879, arguing each era read such sightings through its own beliefs.
Photo: Cmichel67, CC BY-SA 4.0
MediaMar 1992
Ballantine Books published Jacques Vallee's account of his 1990 trip to the Soviet Union, where under glasnost he met Soviet scientists and researchers and interviewed people reporting UFO encounters.
Photo: Christopher Michel, CC BY-SA 4.0
Media1992
Jacques Vallee published Forbidden Science (North Atlantic Books), his personal journals from 1957 to 1969, recounting his early UFO research and why he felt mainstream science treated the topic as off-limits. Later volumes covered the following decades.
Photo: Cmichel67, CC BY-SA 4.0
MediaOct 1991
Ballantine Books published Jacques Vallee's 'Revelations', the last book of his alien contact trilogy. Vallee argued that many UFO stories were deliberate hoaxes or manipulation by private groups or government psychological-warfare efforts, and that researchers had been misled.
Photo: Christopher Michel, CC BY-SA 4.0
Media1990
Jacques Vallee published 'Five Arguments Against the Extraterrestrial Origin of Unidentified Flying Objects' in the Journal of Scientific Exploration, arguing that the reports did not fit a simple visiting-spacecraft explanation.
Photo: Cmichel67, CC BY-SA 4.0
Media1990
Jacques Vallee published Confrontations (Ballantine), the second book of his alien contact trilogy, describing his own field investigations of some forty UFO cases around the world.
Photo: Cmichel67, CC BY-SA 4.0
Media1988
Jacques Vallee published Dimensions: A Casebook of Alien Contact (Contemporary Books), the first of his alien contact trilogy, comparing modern UFO reports with older folklore and visionary accounts and arguing the extraterrestrial idea did not explain them.
Photo: Cmichel67, CC BY-SA 4.0
Media1987
The Society for Scientific Exploration began publishing the Journal of Scientific Exploration in 1987, a peer-reviewed outlet for research on anomalies outside established fields. Its papers have included work by UFO researchers such as Jacques Vallee.
Close encounters1979
Jacques Vallee published Messengers of Deception: UFO Contacts and Cults (And/Or Press), a critical look at contactee groups and UFO cults that questioned the motives of those promoting alien-contact beliefs.
Photo: Cmichel67, CC BY-SA 4.0
Government27 Nov 1978
At a UN Special Political Committee meeting on Grenada's UFO item, astronomer J. Allen Hynek, speaking with Grenada's delegation, said the phenomenon's scope was not recognized, and Jacques Vallee urged scientific study while saying there was no evidence UFOs were visitors from space.
Photo: United States Government, Public domain
Media20 Jan 1975
Claude Poher of the French space agency CNES and Jacques Vallee presented a statistical paper on patterns in UFO reports at the AIAA 13th Aerospace Sciences Meeting in Pasadena, placing the subject before a major engineering society.
Photo: Christopher Michel, CC BY-SA 4.0
Media1975
Former Blue Book consultant J. Allen Hynek and computer scientist Jacques Vallee published 'The Edge of Reality: A Progress Report on Unidentified Flying Objects', treating UFOs as a real but unexplained phenomenon and proposing a framework for further study.
Photo: United States Government, Public domain
Media1975
Jacques Vallee published The Invisible College (Dutton), describing an informal network of scientists he said had quietly traded UFO data for years, and asking whether the phenomenon acts on human belief. A French edition, Le college invisible, appeared the same year.
Photo: Cmichel67, CC BY-SA 4.0
Sightings4 Sep 1971
A Costa Rican government mapping aircraft at 10,000 feet photographed a disc-shaped image over Lago de Cote that no one aboard saw; the frames before and after did not show it. Researchers Richard Haines and Jacques Vallee analyzed copies in 1989 and could not identify it.
Photo: Sergio Loaiza, Public domain
MediaOct 1969
Jacques Vallee's Passport to Magonia: From Folklore to Flying Saucers (Henry Regnery) compared modern accounts of UFO occupants with fairy lore and religious legends, and listed a century of reported landings. It became the key text for treating UFO encounters as part of a folklore tradition.
Photo: Cmichel67, CC BY-SA 4.0
Media1966
Jacques and Janine Vallee published 'Challenge to Science: The UFO Enigma' with Regnery in Chicago. The book analyzed patterns in UFO reports by place, time and object type, and Kirkus called it the most rational of that year's UFO books.
Photo: Cmichel67, CC BY-SA 4.0
Media1965
Astronomer and computer scientist Jacques Vallee published Anatomy of a Phenomenon, which classified historical and modern UFO reports and argued they deserved systematic analysis. Kirkus called it a usable manual of analytical methods for general readers.
Photo: Christopher Michel, CC BY-SA 4.0
