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Joe Rogan · 2025-03-12 · 2h 47m

Joe Rogan Experience #2288 - Jacques Vallée

Computer scientist and UFO researcher Jacques Vallée walks Joe Rogan through remote viewing at Stanford, government UFO files, and his own brushes with the unexplained.

Joe Rogan Experience #2288 - Jacques Vallée
The guest

Jacques Vallée — French-born computer scientist who worked on the early ARPANET at Stanford Research Institute and became one of the most respected, scientifically rigorous UFO researchers in the world. A venture capitalist and author of the 'Forbidden Science' diaries and many books on unexplained phenomena.

The gist

Vallée recounts how, while at Stanford Research Institute in the 1970s, he helped launch and observe the CIA-funded remote viewing program with Ingo Swann, Hal Puthoff, and Russell Targ, describing the coordinate remote viewing method and his own startling physiological experience of 'being' on an Andean peak. The conversation moves to his decades of UFO fieldwork, including the egg-shaped craft cases in his book 'Trinity' (Trinity, Socorro, and Valensole), recurring humanoid 'beings' who breathe air, and physical evidence such as a Council Bluffs molten-steel sample he and Gary Nolan analyzed and published. Vallée stresses scientific caution: governments explain roughly 95% of UFO reports, and the interesting 5% deserve rigorous lab work rather than hype. He explores how militaries can disguise aircraft as flying saucers with radar-spoofing devices, the simulation hypothesis, and the possibility that craft slip into another dimension. He closes with personal paranormal experiences, including an out-of-body encounter with a rectangular entity and lights seen at his Redwood Forest observatory.

Big reveals

  • Vallée describes physically feeling cold, dizzy and afraid of falling during a remote viewing session, then learning Ingo Swann had sent him to a peak in the Andes.
  • Says remote viewer Joe McMoneagle psychically described a hidden Soviet super-submarine inside a windowless building, and was later proven right.
  • Recounts the 'Trinity' case: an egg-shaped craft that crashed near White Sands in 1945, two years before Roswell, with witnesses who watched the recovery for ten days.
  • Details a 1977 Council Bluffs case where half a ton of glowing molten steel fell in a park in freezing weather with no industrial source.
  • Reveals that military insiders told him aircraft were deliberately disguised as flying saucers to test whether they could penetrate nuclear-facility perimeters.
  • Vallée describes seeing a silver, dome-topped flying saucer over a cathedral as a 15-year-old in France in 1955, the event that launched his lifelong interest.
  • Admits that after attempting a paranormal mental experiment he was propelled out of his body and confronted a massive rectangular entity, waking up screaming.
  • Says Federico Faggin, a father of the integrated circuit, privately told him he saw the chip's design while out of his body.

Things worth remembering

  • Vallée worked on engine number three of the ARPANET at SRI before the internet existed, when there were already about 30 machines on the network.
  • Pacific island navigators relied on a single gifted person per ship who had an uncanny, unexplained ability to find the right islands without compasses.
  • Vallée says the idea of coordinate remote viewing came out of his explaining computer memory addressing to artist Ingo Swann.
  • His key takeaway from the SRI studies: the psychic 'signal' is so large it overwhelms the brain, and the skill is catching and recalling it without naming it.
  • France has run an official government UFO project that can tap the resources of its weather service, Air Force, and radar agencies.
  • Disc-like flying objects appear in legends, paintings, and a Burgundy token showing a disc protecting the land from arrows, long before modern pop-culture saucers.
  • In the Socorro case, a motor-pool chief's car mysteriously died and radio failed near a bright light; a full teardown found nothing wrong, in an unpublished official report.
  • The famous Nimitz 'Tic Tac' image is an infrared sensor image, not a photograph; a Raytheon memo noted the device was built to read engine exhaust heat, not track saucers.
  • A peer-reviewed January 2025 paper describes Chinese tech that can make a small drone appear on radar as large as a flying stadium.
  • Vallée notes the Moon is almost exactly the angular size of the Sun, giving Earth total eclipses, one of several 'just right' coincidences he finds strange.

Recommended in this episode

Books, products and media the guest or host genuinely endorsed here — with the buy link.

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Guest’s ownBook

The Invisible College

Jacques Vallée

“I consumed three of your books in the last six months and the there was this the series of three that you did right now I'm on the invisible College” — Joe Rogan 00:51:36
Find it on Amazon
Guest’s ownBook

Trinity: The Best-Kept Secret

Jacques Vallée and Paola Harris

“I wrote a book with paa Harris called Trinity about an egg shaped object that happened 1945 near White Sands it's called Trinity” — Jacques Vallée 01:12:15
Find it on Amazon
Guest’s ownBook

Forbidden Science 6

Jacques Vallée

“your book again the one that's available now this is Forbidden Science 6 this is the sixth of these books” — Jacques Vallée 02:46:12
Find it on Amazon