Not All Nutsy-Boltsy-ETH

Dr. Jacques Vallee

So, I listened to Dr. Jacques Vallee and Paola Harris on Fade To Black with Jimmy Church talking about their new book, Trinity: The Best Kept Secret, (which I just discovered is available right now, this second on Kindle) last night, so you don’t have to.

I wanted to see what they had to say in response to all of the hew and cry that is currently going on in the UFO community.

One of the reasons people are having a cow over Vallee and Harris’ new book is because it is about a crashed UFO retrieval, which Vallee has historically said he was uninterested in studying. (The fact that he has been gathering up physical traces and materials from UFOs and having them analyzed for decades rather belies that stated disinterest, but more on that later.)

People perceive this book as a departure from Vallee’s typical tactic of examining patterns within the larger UFO phenomena. People are acting as if he never has investigated singular cases before—which is absolutely not true. In order to look at the entirety of a large scale phenomena like UFO’s, one must first look at individual cases, and this is something Dr. Vallee has done from the beginning.

People are also upset because this case gives Dr. Vallee the appearance of having “gone over” to the “Nuts and Bolts” Extraterrestrial Hypothesis” side of theorizing. This is particularly disturbing to some, when Dr. Vallee was, with the publication of Passport to Magonia among the first UFO theorists to highlight the similarities between folklore and modern UFO experiences. He then went on to suggest various other theories to explain what UFOs could represent besides extraterrestrial visitors from space. He suggested that the UFOs were perhaps interdimensional in nature, for example.

UFO folks seem to have their collective underpants in a bunch over the idea that Dr. Vallee is doing something new and different, making an about face, when in fact, the case examined in this book fits into the pattern of other cases of his from the past.

How so, one might ask?

Well, let’s look at the 2018 film, “Witness of Another World.”

This film centers on a case he investigated in the 1970’s in Argentina. There, he and his wife and investigative partner Janine Vallee, met with Juan Perez, a 12-year old gaucho boy. After being sent out on horseback one morning by his father to bring in the horse herd, Juan encountered an anomalous, dense fog. He and his horse, Cometa, went into the fog, and there he found a landed “craft..”

Juan tied his horse to the ladder that led up into the ship and went inside. There, he was confronted by mysterious beings, had psychic communication with them and saw his deceased grandfather.

He rode away on his horse, and told his father what he had seen, and within days the horse died.

And how do Harris and Vallee describe the case that is central to this new book?

Two hispanic boys, Jose Padilla, age 9, and Remigio Baca, age 6, are sent out on horseback by Jose’s father, to find and bring in from the range a cow who is about to calve. They go out, and after taking shelter from a sudden rainstorm with lightning and thunder under a rock, they hear what sounds like an explosion and the ground trembles, much as it had a month before when the atomic bomb test at Trinity had occurred a few miles away from their homes.

They look out and see fire and smoke, they ride toward it as far as they can go, then tie up their horses and walk the rest of the way.

They end up finding an avocado shaped object on its side, with a jagged hole in it. Inside were three or four “hombrecitos”—little men—who are strange looking and they move oddly. They look back at the children and there is psychic contact with them. The boys ride home in a fright, and tell Jose’s father.

Later on another day, the boys return with Jose’s father and a policeman, and then, the US Army arrives and over a period of days, a few soldiers gather up the debris and put the object on a trailer and haul it away to parts unknown. The object is never put under full guard, so the children hide in the rocks and watch all of this go down and they sneak in and enter the object, see it is devoid of any visible controls or visible propulsion, take pieces of the wreckage and then, hide them away.

One of these pieces was later purchased by Harris to be analyzed by Vallee. (One thing people seem to be stuck on is Vallee’s interest in physical bits from alleged UFO’s—as noted above, he’s been collecting such materials for years and has talked about it in books like Confrontations: A Scientist’s Search for Alien Contact and most recently in the film, “The Phenomenon.”

Let’s look at this in terms of folklore—one of the ways you analyze two separate stories in folklore is you look for similarities in motifs, which are bits of a story that you can pick out and analyze.

Both stories involve children. In both stories the children are hispanic. In both stories, the children are sent out by their fathers, to go out into their rangelands on their ranch to retrieve livestock. In both stories the children are confronted by a a strange object on the ground, in both stories, there are beings in the object, in both stories, there seems to be no propulsion or controls for the object, in both stories the children have psychic communication with the beings in the object, and in both stories, the children return home without the livestock they had been sent after and they tell their fathers what they have seen.

If we look at it in folklore, what we have are two analogous stories, so similar, they could be considered variants of the same story.

Which tells me that we are looking at two classic Jacques Vallee cases.

There are of course, differences between the two stories.

Juan Perez was interviewed by Vallee shortly after his experience,, while he and Harris never got a chance to interview the Jose and Remi at the time of thier sighting for the very simple reason that Vallee was a child in 1945 in war torn France and Harris hadn’t even been born!

This is a shame, because while there were no frames of reference for UFOs in 1945 (remember, Kenneth Arnold’s sighting and Roswell occurred in 1947), Padilla and Baca didn’t tell their stories until they were well into their 70’s.

My concern with this gap between the event and Harris’ interview of them men is there was plenty of time for UFO lore to invade their memories. (No, I am not saying they willfully lied or added to their stories—I’m saying that the popular UFO lore depicted in books, movies and television shows had plenty of time to seep into their consciousnesses over decades and to taint their memories—-all with the men unconscious of this happening.)

The promise of the book of course, that it will change how we look at UFO history forever—and it may well do that, -if- there is corroborative evidence. This piece of the puzzle is also classic Vallee—he’s always been interested in finding pre 1947 possible UFO experiences from history—his books Passport to Magonia and Wonders in the Sky are full of such stories.

And, finally, near the end of the interview, when Church asks Dr. Vallee, “Was it one of ours?” meaning was the object some sort of human-built prototype aircraft, he answers, “No.”

But then, he goes on to add, and I am paraphrasing, “No, it is not human-made, but it was physical. However, that does not mean it was from outer space. It doesn’t mean it was extraterrestrial—there are many other explanations of where it could have come from.”

So, there we are.

Dr. Vallee hasn’t stepped that far out of his typical pattern of looking for patterns within the UFO phenomena with this case. He hasn’t gone all “Nutsy-Boltsy ETH” either.

The case central to this book, which also takes up the angle of UFO’s historic connection with atomic weapons and their tendency to be seen lurking around military nuclear facilities, fits perfectly within the sorts of culturally-grounded, historically relevant cases with physical traces that Dr. Vallee has pursued his entire life.

In another blog post, I will take up how Paola Harris became Dr. Vallee’s co-author of this book.

After I go read the book, as it is burning a hole in my Kindle right now, begging to be opened.