50 GCAT: How did you first become interested in UFOs and
paranormal phenomena?
Vallee: I started out wanting to do astronomy and I ruined
essentially a perfectly good career in science by becoming
interested in computers. This was in France in the early days of
computing and the earliest days of satellites and space
exploration. So I took some of the earliest computer courses at
French universities.
My first job was at Paris observatory, tracking satellites. And we
started tracking objects that were not satellites, were fairly
elusive, and so we decided that we would pay attention to those
objects even though they were not on the schedule of normal
satellites. And one night we got eleven data points on one of these
objects--it was very bright. It was also retrograde. This was at a
time when there was no rocket powerful enough to launch a
retrograde satellite, a satellite that goes around opposite to the
rotation of the earth, where you obviously need to overcome the
earth's gravity going the other direction. You have to reach escape
velocity in the direction opposite the rotation of the earth, which
takes a lot more energy than the direct direction. And the man in
charge of the project confiscated the tape and erased it the next
morning.
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"The best UFO data has never been published. I think a
great deal of the misunderstanding about UFOs among
scientists is that the scientists have never had access
to the best data."
So that's really what got me interested. Because up to then I
thought, Scientists don't seem to be interested in UFOs,
astronomers don't report anything unusual in the sky, so there
probably isn't anything to it. Effectively, I was in the same
position that most scientists are in today--you trust your
colleagues, and because you don't see any reports from credible,
technical witnesses, you assume that there is nothing. And there I
was with a technical report--I don't know what it was. It wasn't a
flying saucer--it didn't land close to the observatory. But still,
it was a mystery. And instead of looking at the data and preserving
the data, we were destroying it.
50 GCAT: Why did he destroy it?
Vallee: Just fear of ridicule. He thought that the Americans
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Article-ID: 05_1997&1101257
Score: 78
Subject: Resume: supervisory/managerial or non supervisory position in a clinical or research laboratory