Vallée's 1979 conclusions on government involvement

Vallée's 1979 conclusions on government involvement

Date	1979
People	Jacques Vallée
Testimony	Shellenberger testimony, p. 87
Year	1979 in UFO history
Timeline	1979 on the UAP Timeline
Sources	13

Vallée's 1979 conclusions on government involvement refers to the view, set out by the UFO researcher Jacques Vallée in his 1979 book Messengers of Deception, that human groups were exploiting the UFO phenomenon to manipulate belief.^[2] In the book Vallée wrote that UFOs were real physical devices that affect human consciousness. They might not come from outer space, and he suspected "there are groups of people on Earth exploiting this deception" through manipulation of witnesses and contactees, covert use of sects and cults, and control of the channels through which "space messages" reach the public.^[2] Michael Shellenberger's 2024 UFO timeline, submitted to the House Oversight Committee, lists under 1979 Vallée's statement that he was "convinced" the U.S. government was still very much involved with UFOs. It describes that involvement as extending to close monitoring of UFO organisations, the staging of false sightings and the leaking of false documents.^[11] That wording, however, comes from Vallée's 1990 book Confrontations, not from 1979.^[13]

Messengers of Deception (1979)

According to the Goodreads listing, Messengers of Deception: UFO Contacts and Cults was first published on 1 January 1979. Readers' quotations from the book show its main lines of argument.^[2]

• Origins of his interest. Vallée describes becoming seriously interested in 1961. That year he saw French astronomers erase a tape on which his satellite-tracking team had recorded eleven data points on an unknown object, for fear of ridicule.
• Three aspects. The UFO problem, he wrote, has three aspects: physical, psychological and social.
• Mass manipulation. He wrote that he believed "there is a machinery of mass manipulation behind the UFO phenomenon". In his view it served social and political goals, diverting attention from some human problems and releasing tensions caused by others. Contactees, he argued, were part of that machinery, building public expectation of contact and "salvation from above".
• His conclusions. UFOs are real. They are physical devices used to affect human consciousness, and they may not be from outer space. Their purpose may be social change, achieved through systematic manipulation of witnesses and contactees, covert use of sects and cults, and control of the channels through which "space messages" reach the public.
• The television analogy. He compared UFOs to a television set: a physical object, but also a tool that controls awareness and can show staged scenes the viewer cannot tell from real ones.
• A human hoax? He asked whether a group of humans could simulate the arrival of visitors as a deliberate deception, and whether we would ever know.
• Contactee themes. Drawing on Paris Flammonde's remark that many contactees spread philosophies "tinged, if not tainted, with totalitarian overtones", Vallée catalogued troubling themes in contactee belief. They included "intellectual abdication", the idea that humans need extraterrestrial rescue, and a "racist philosophy" of supposed extraterrestrial descent.
• "Major Murphy". He quoted a source, "Major Murphy", who suggested the confusion in the UFO mystery may have been deliberate, both to keep scientists away and to create conditions for new forms of social control.

The journals of the 1970s

Vallée's journals for the 1970s, published as the second volume of Forbidden Science, record contacts that fed these suspicions. A 2016 post on the UFOs Scientific Research blog quotes them.^[4]

• 1972–73. A contact, Howell McConnell, asked Vallée whether he knew of a group at Wright-Patterson doing secret analyses for the Air Force, which was said to have confiscated UFO negatives. Hal Puthoff told him of a government project that sometimes asked his psychics to remote-view suspected UFO bases.
• 1974. The CIA scientist Kit Green told Vallée that the agency would not run long-term research without proof, but agreed there might be a secret effort "within private industry". Later that year Green "reluctantly confirmed" a group of 15 engineers in the Midwest secretly doing UFO research for the CIA under cover of "aeronautical research".
• 1975. J. Allen Hynek asked Donald Rumsfeld at the White House whether there was a secret study, and was told: "You do NOT have a need to know."
• 1978. A caller from McDonnell Douglas Astronautics told Vallée of an ongoing, well-funded secret project, monitored by the CIA and "discreetly connected with major UFO groups". Later that year Vallée wrote that it was continuing with John Schuessler and seemed to be looking for exotic alloys. Green, meanwhile, had been told that the agency had no mission to monitor the subject.
• "Reflections". At the end of the volume Vallée concluded that the intelligence agencies of several countries, "notably the U.S., the U.K. and France (often acting in concert)", had encouraged a few private scientists and physicians from UFO groups and aerospace companies to conduct "semi-official, deniable" investigations.

Later statements

• Dimensions (1988). In Dimensions Vallée described a "triple cover-up" shielding the phenomenon from study, beginning with official denial. He wrote that major UFO believer groups had been "closely monitored by government agents", because their influence could be manipulated for political goals or as a test of deception. Civilian groups had been infiltrated by people linked to intelligence, because they offered "a useful channel for planted stories". Freedom of Information requests, he wrote, had shown that the CIA and Pentagon were involved, "often covertly", and "I suspect that they are still involved". He added that the government might simply be hiding that it had no more idea of the phenomenon's nature than in the 1940s.^[12]
• Confrontations (1990). On page 21 of Confrontations Vallée wrote that, like many colleagues, he had become convinced that the U.S. and other governments were "very much involved in the UFO business". That involvement went beyond normal intelligence data collection to "the close monitoring of the UFO organizations themselves, and in some case, to the staging of false sightings and the occasional leaking of false documents". On the next page he added that he did not believe any government had the answer to the UFO problem, "although several governments must have the proof of its reality".^[13]
• 2006 interview. In a 2006 French radio interview, summarised by Gildas Bourdais, Vallée said that the aim of the disinformation he had described since Messengers of Deception was not to hide UFOs but the opposite. It was "to make people believe in UFOs, by means of clever rumours and staged events", in order to hide other secrets, probably highly secret technology. He called it "disinformation to hide something else". He described the Rendlesham Forest affair as "an experiment in psychological war", and cited the Bennewitz case as manipulation.^[1]
• 1989. By September 1989, after a decade of asking insiders, Vallée wrote that he saw "a large disinformation campaign" but could find no trace of what it was hiding. (See Vallée on the disinformation campaign (1989).)^[4]

The Bennewitz affair

Vallée's suspicion of deliberate manipulation was partly borne out in the 1980s by the case of Paul Bennewitz, an Albuquerque businessman who believed he was intercepting alien signals near Kirtland Air Force Base. According to the Wikipedia account, Bennewitz was the target of a disinformation campaign that ended with his psychiatric hospitalisation in 1988. On 1 July 1989 the ufologist William Moore said he had tried to push Bennewitz into a breakdown by feeding him false information. A 1992 article in the CIA's library named Moore and the Air Force Office of Special Investigations agent Richard Doty as responsible. Doty later said that in the 1980s he had been tasked with hoaxing documents and feeding false information to UFO researchers, including Bennewitz.^[5] (See Bennewitz affair.)

Assessment

The Bennewitz case shows that U.S. intelligence agents did feed false information to at least one UFO researcher, and that forged documents circulated in the 1980s.^[5] Whether governments ever staged sightings, as Vallée suggested, remains unproven in the sources read here. In the 2006 interview summary, Bourdais and the Center for UFO Studies disputed Vallée's reading of one key document, the 1953 "Pentacle" letter. Nick Pope said he knew of no evidence for Vallée's view of Rendlesham.^[1] Vallée's journals, now in several volumes, remain the fullest record of the private conversations behind his views.^[6][7][8][9]

Notes on the earlier version

• The "convinced" statement. The earlier version, following Shellenberger's timeline, dated Vallée's statement that he was convinced the government was involved, including by staging false sightings and leaking false documents, to 1979. The blog post the timeline cites quotes these words from page 21 of Confrontations, published in 1990.^[13][11] The link to that post given in the earlier version was malformed and returned "not found".^[10] The 1979 book set out a related but broader argument about manipulation by human groups.^[2]
• Military, media or government links. The earlier version said Messengers of Deception argued that contactee groups were being manipulated by human agencies "with possible links to military, media or government circles", through faked photographs and interference with witnesses. The quotations read here speak of groups of people exploiting the deception, manipulation of witnesses and contactees, and political connections. They do not mention faked photographs, so that detail is not covered in the sources read here.^[2]
• 2008 interview. The earlier version cited a 2008 Boing Boing interview in which Vallée said quasi-official interest becomes a problem "when it extends to faking sightings". That page refused automated access, so the quotation is not covered in the sources read here.^[3]
• Reception. The earlier version said the book "was controversial among UFO researchers" and that reviewers summarised it as implicating the U.S. government. These characterisations are not covered in the sources read here, though Vallée told Bourdais in 2006 that ufologists rejected his books.^[1]

People and topics

• Jacques Vallée — Computer scientist and astronomer, author of the Forbidden Science journals and a central figure in UFO research.
• Unidentified anomalous phenomena — The U.S. government's current term for unidentified objects in the air, in space and underwater.
• Unidentified flying object — An object in the sky that can't be identified; the older term for UAP.
• Messengers of Deception — Jacques Vallée's 1979 book on manipulation of UFO beliefs.
• Bennewitz affair — Bennewitz affair
• U.S. Air Force — The U.S. military service that ran the official UFO projects from 1947 to 1969.

On the Timeline

• Hynek on the Robertson Panel's legacy (1979) — Hynek says the Robertson Panel set an unwritten Air Force rule to play UAP down.
• Dale Graff and Wright-Patterson remote viewing (1979) — Dale Graff is said to have run a remote viewing program at Wright-Patterson, then moved to the DIA.

See every 1979 event on the UAP Timeline →

Further reading

References

Facts in this article are drawn in part from the Wikipedia article “Paul Bennewitz”, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.