Secrets Within Secrets

The “original” book cover of Dr. Vallee’s newest book, as shown in Amazon.

Last Saturday, May 1, I was minding my own business, re-reading Patrick Harpur’s Daimonic Reality, when my phone binged to tell me that I had a message on FB. I opened it up and there was a UFO friend of mine, Steve Coop, and he had most intriguing news for me:

Dr. Jacques Vallee’s newest book, entitled The Best Kept Secret, had been inexplicably delayed and had, in fact disappeared from Amazon’s website, as well as other online bookstore’s sites. Since it was due out in three days, this of course, caused consternation and puzzlement.

However, even though it had disappeared, those of us who had pre-ordered the book on Amazon—the orders were still open, but if you clicked the link on the order, there was no page for the book.

Curiouser and curiouser.

Of course, the UFO subs on Reddit were ablaze with speculation, paranoia and wild theorizing. (Which is why I never post to any of them.)

I told Steve that it likely had diddly squat to do with the government quashing the book because Dr. Vallee was revealing some great and dangerous secret to the unwashed masses. Nor did I think it had anything to do with the impending “disclosure” that the government was gearing up to do, because I don’t believe that’s going to be significant to any great extent.

Instead, I opined that it likely had to do with the papers he’s been writing on analysis of the anomalous metallic fragments found in conjunction with UFO “crash sites” that he’s been working on for decades. Last I’d heard, he’d submitted papers to peer reviewed journals, and it was possible that more information had come to light in this review process and he pulled the book from publication to add or remove information from it so that it wouldn’t go out of date as soon as it hit the public’s hot and eager hands.

I thought that was the end of it.

But, oh, no. That wasn’t the case.

It’s never that simple, y’all.

Nearly a week later, once again, I was minding my own business, this time, writing emails and working on a blog post (Not this one. The one I was PLANNING on posting today, but am instead posting this one….), when I decided to look at Facebook.

There I found Joshua Cutchin’s post which said simply, “WTF, Jacques?”

Now, I knew which Jacques he meant. Clearly it was not Jacques Pepin to whom he was directing his query.

So, I had to read the entire thread and that’s where I first saw this “revised” cover for Dr. Vallee’s newest book.

The “revised” book cover. Which isn’t revised at all. Read on to see where I’m going with this.

Speculation as to what was going on was coming fast and furious.

UFO Twitter was all over it and Reddit was roiling with all sorts of crazy.

And I engaged on Josh’s thread because while I do not tweet nor do I bother with communicating on Reddit, I will converse with rational folks on Facebook. And I participated similarly on Greg Bishop’s Radio Misterioso Facebook page on the topic.

And there was a lot to read and think about, and my brain went galumphing off along with everyone else’s asking questions and conjuring up possible answers.

First of all, a CO-AUTHOR? What? Where had she come from? Did she just appear in the last week? Who is she? What does she do? WHAAAAAT?

Italian investigative journalist Paola Leopizzi Harris turns out to be a pretty standard proponent of the Extraterrestrial Hypothesis of UFOs, and she’s….not generally as well respected as Dr. Vallee is in the field. People whose opinions I respect are pretty unimpressed by her and her ideas. So, I was wincing inwardly as I read on. Then looked up her work, and winced harder.

Later that evening, I found that Linda Moulton Howe had called the good doctor on the phone to get shit straight and was told that new information had come to light and he had pulled the book in order to add that new information.

And she helpfully posted a press release he had sent her.

The reading, speculation and thoughts continued yesterday as I cleaned the entire house because a friend was coming to dinner and I hadn’t been able to bestir myself to dust in..like….a long time.

Then Chris and Morganna arrived and we had a merry talk about his continuing work on building a searchable database of Albert Rosales’ Humanoid Sightings, and shared news of paranormal nature, including this news about Vallee’s book, and all the speculations and questions about the new title, subject and co-author.

Then we had dinner and talked and had a great time visiting and after dinner, I worked again on that other blog post (you’ll see it in a week, be patient).

But the buzz around the The Best Kept Secret kept coming up in my head, so I gave up editing the blog post and went off track, digging around the Internet for any clues I could find to perhaps explain this entire meshugas. (That’s Yiddish for a crazy mess.)

I found an interview with Dr. Vallee in the March 2006 edition of The Daily Grail’s “Sub Rosa” magazine, and in it, I found a quote that sat in my head and fomented thought.

When asked by the interviewer what “three top cases should we be devoting attention to” in order to best research the UFO question as a whole.

Dr. Vallee replied, “I am not comfortable with the idea of basing the reality of the phenomenon on a few so-called “best cases.” We have to start from a global assessment of patterns in a large number of cases where common misidentifications have been screened out. To that end, I have developed a family of four computer catalogues from several parts of the world, under a new standard format. This requires a major effort but fortunately the tools of database development have evolved rapidly in the last few years. Roswell, in my opinion, is a blind alley. It is a major tactical mistake to base the argument for UFOs entirely on a case that has so little scientific evidence and so much ambiguous and conflicting testimony surrounding it.” (Emphasis added by author.)

That quote stuck out to me, because while it is a quintessentially Dr. Vallee quote (he has always leaned more heavily on looking at the larger picture of the UFO problem in context with social, political and historical data, with an eye toward seeking patterns) it also seems to be directly at odds with revealed content of his newest book, which appears to be about a singular case involving a UFO crash that predates Roswell.

That interview was on my mind as I fell asleep, and as is often the case, my subconscious mind took up the problem where the conscious mind left off and I woke up with a new idea.

And here we get to the meat of this post.

I think that what we are witnessing is a bit of a ploy on Dr. Vallee’s part. I think this entire meshugas—the original cover of the book, its disappearance on Amazon, and then the press release a week later was deliberate misdirection as to the title of the book, the nature of its contents and the presence and identity of the co-author.

Why do I think this?

Simple.

Dr. Vallee is not a stupid man, nor is he inexperienced in the ways in which the UFO community acts and reacts to anything in the least bit new, different or controversial in the field. He knows how any perceived change in his own ideas is going to cause waves to crash through the community, and battle lines will be drawn and minds made up long before the book is even published, much less anyone has even had a chance to read it.

He also knows about how his co-author’s work is perceived by others in the field. And, in this field, generally, once one’s mind is made up about a researcher or author, ones mind stays that way,. We UFO folks can be a prejudicial lot, and no amount of good work done by said author later will change the UFO community’s perception of them, once a consensus has formed.

Don’t believe me? Well, we all know about Dr. J. Allen Hyneck’s swamp gas comment. A comment which he deeply regretted, and which doesn’t reflect his later excellent analysis and research at all—but we still remember it, long after his death. And while Dr. Hyneck is generally lauded now, for a long while, UFO fans groaned at every mention of his name.

And, of course, Dr. Vallee was there for that—he lived that experience with Dr. Hyneck.

So, his co-author, Ms. Harris, (whose work I have not read), may not be well respected by people I trust, but Dr. Vallee respects her enough to put his name on a book with hers. However, he knows how we are, so he decided to forestall the rumblings, grumblings and judgements that are going on RIGHT NOW, by concealing her existence until a month before the book comes out.

A month’s worth of speculation and furor are enough to deal with, but six or more months of it would be tiresome at least, and infuriating at most.

Consider this. If he had released this information back in December when I first found out about and pre-ordered the book, all of this speculation would have gone on for months, with questions of the authors’ characters and theories, whether or not Dr. Vallee had hopped onto the ETH bandwagon and thus lost his mind, questions as to his mental acuity due to his age—-all of this would have been going on while he and Harris worked to complete the manuscript on time for publication.

By releasing the book under a revised, more secretive title, with no mention of a co-author, he managed to generate buzz and excitement for the book while sidestepping all of the drama that we now are watching unfold. With a longer, more drawn out spate of drama, not only would he and his co-author and publishers have to deal with questions, requests for interviews as well as the possibility that there would be this well-known researcher or that UFO pundit declaring they weren’t going to bother to read the book “Because obviously, everything Vallee said up until now was bullshit and it was ETs all along.!”

He wants us to read the book and THEN judge, not the other way around. And for a field where lots of people like to say we’re all about science and are logical and rational and sensible—we are pretty emotional people. We get het up easily, and sometimes that’s a problem.

Finally, by occluding the title and co-author, and thus avoiding the hullabaloo until the last minute, Dr. Vallee ensured that he and Ms. Harris were able to glean as much information from their sources in the intelligence community as possible without fear of having said sources clam up because of the unfolding drama in social media.

Intelligence people like secrets to be secret. They get squirrelly and scurry off if their veil of secrecy is disturbed by a tempest in a teapot or in social media.

So there we are. The Best Kept Secret wasn’t just the subject of the book—the title and the co-author were also well-kept secrets.

And I don’t mind a bit. I think Dr. Vallee was sensible and well-reasoned in his decision to handle the release of the book this way. Because, we UFO folks are really, honestly not known for our sensible, well-reasoned responses to surprises and new information.

Oh, and one more thing—about those metamaterials that he’s been collecting, establishing a chain of custody and analyzing for decades. This is not new information—he’s been at this for a long time, and he’s already released information regarding anomalous properties of some of these fragments in the recent past.

In 2017, he gave an open lecture in Paris on the findings he and other scientists he’s worked with have made regarding metamaterials collected in the context of the UFO phenomenon. The paper, entitled, “What Do We Know About the Composition of UFOs?” regarding the metamaterials is available for download at academia.edu is well worth reading and thinking on.

Remember, just because he has in his possession physical bits of metal that seem to have been engineered, but apparently not by humans, doesn’t mean that Dr. Vallee has gone all “nutsy-boltsy ETH” on us. Non-human intelligence can originate in many places other than another planet. That is just one possibility.

I don’t believe that the metamaterials or the secrets revealed in Trinity: The Best Kept Secret are going to provide us with -the- answer to the UFO question. Or even -an- answer to the many questions that surround the subject of UFOs.

I think it’s just going to bring up a whole lot more questions.

And that’s ok. I like chasing after mysteries.

Wouldn’t it be boring if we had all of the questions answered, once and for all?