Vallée's 1979 conclusions on government involvement
From the UAP Encyclopedia, the open encyclopedia of UFO and UAP history · 🗓️ Event
Contents 7
| Date | 1979 |
|---|---|
| People | Jacques Vallée |
| Testimony | Shellenberger testimony, p. 87 |
| Year | 1979 in UFO history |
| Timeline | 1979 on the UAP Timeline |
| Sources | 10 |
By 1979 Jacques Vallée had concluded that the U.S. government remained involved with UFOs beyond simply collecting reports, and that agencies might be monitoring witnesses and UFO groups and even staging events to manipulate belief. That year he published Messengers of Deception, setting out the argument.[1][2]
Messengers of Deception
The book examined UFO contactee groups, cults and hoaxes, and argued that some were being manipulated by human agencies — with possible links to military, media or government circles — through faked photographs, interference with witnesses, rumours and staged events, whatever the nature of the underlying phenomenon. Reviewers summarised its conclusion as implicating the U.S. government and other covert groups. It was controversial among UFO researchers.[2][3]
Vallée's journals
Vallée's journals for the late 1970s record a series of contacts that fed these suspicions: CIA scientist Kit Green's remarks about a secret engineering group, a McDonnell Douglas employee's call about a close-encounter database in 1978, and Vallée's reflection that U.S., British and French intelligence services encouraged private scientists to conduct semi-official, deniable investigations.[4]
Later views
Vallée returned to the theme repeatedly. In a 2006 radio interview he said the aim of disinformation was to make people believe in UFOs "by means of clever rumours and staged events" in order to hide other secrets, and in a 2008 interview he said quasi-official interest becomes a problem when it extends to faking sightings. His suspicion was partly vindicated in the 1980s, when the Bennewitz affair showed Air Force counterintelligence agents feeding false information to a UFO researcher. Whether governments ever staged sightings remains unproven.[1][3][5]
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 →
References
- Gildas Bourdais, summary of Jacques Vallée's radio interview (Mar 2006), Patrick Gross · ufology.patrickgross.org · archived copy
- "Messengers of Deception", Goodreads · goodreads.com · archived copy
- "Jacques Vallée's Messengers of Deception", Boing Boing (Jun 2008) · boingboing.net · archived copy
- "Was there secret US government research?", UFOs Scientific Research (Oct 2016) · ufos-scientificresearch.blogspot.com · archived copy
- Paul Bennewitz — Wikipedia · en.wikipedia.org · archived copy
- Forbidden Science — the journals of Jacques Vallée (Anomaly Archives) · anomalyarchives.org · archived copy
- Forbidden Science series — Anomalist Books · anomalistbooks.com · archived copy
- Review of Forbidden Science 6 — SFCrowsnest · sfcrowsnest.info · archived copy
- Forbidden Science Dispatches — Tanner Boyle (journal summaries) · tannerfboyle.substack.com · archived copy
- ufos-scientificresearch.blogspot.com · ufos-scientificresearch.blogspot.com · archived copy
Further reading
- Jacques Vallée — Wikipedia · en.wikipedia.org · archived copy
This page was last edited on 29 October 2026. Articles are written in our own words from the sources listed under References; disputed claims are attributed to the people who made them.
No discussion yet.