Jacques Vallée
Jacques Vallée is a French-American astronomer, computer scientist and UFO researcher who has studied the phenomenon since the 1960s and is one of the best-known proponents of the so-called interdimensional hypothesis.
Jacques Vallée was born in France in 1939 and worked as an astronomer and then as a computer scientist before moving to the United States. During his career he took part in early computer networking research, and later he also worked as a venture capital investor in Silicon Valley.
What he claims
Vallée has been collecting and analyzing UFO reports since the 1960s, and in his view the phenomenon cannot be explained solely by the traditional extraterrestrial hypothesis. According to Vallée, the patterns of the sightings point rather to a phenomenon that behaves in unusual ways in space and time, so he proposed the so-called interdimensional hypothesis, according to which the source of the UFO phenomenon is not necessarily a civilization from another planet, but a layer of reality whose nature is still unknown. Vallée has also carried out historical and folklore analyses, and in his view content similarities can be found between UFO sightings and accounts of supernatural or religious experiences from earlier centuries.
He has written several books on the subject, the best known of which are “Passport to Magonia” and “Dimensions.” Vallée is also one of the founders of the Journal of Scientific Exploration, a journal with scientific aspirations that operates on the periphery of mainstream science.
Official and skeptical positions
The official scientific community has not accepted Vallée's theories as proven fact, and according to skeptical researchers his claims cannot currently be verified with reliable, repeatable methods. Vallée is also associated with the claim that he was reportedly one of the inspirations for the character Claude Lacombe in the film “Close Encounters of the Third Kind.”