As mentioned
recently,
Daily Grail Publishing has just released a reprint of Jacques Vallee's UFO classic,
Messengers of Deception (
Amazon US and
Amazon UK). Last week I had a quick chat with Jacques about the book, and the controversy it created in ufology. It was intentionally short - I could talk to Jacques for a couple of days on all manner of topics, but in this case I just wanted to address the elements of his work which have made him, as he describes it, "a heretic among heretics" - namely, his concern about uncritical acceptance of the UFO phenomenon, and also the 'psychic' manifestations found in UFO reports which suggest that they may not be "nuts and bolts" craft.
TDG: Jacques, thanks for talking with us here at
The Daily Grail. Let's get straight to the new release: the original publication of
Messengers of Deception in 1979 marked quite a turning point in your standing with the ufology community. Your warning that we should be more careful about embracing the phenomenon, and that its underlying qualities could well be negative and deceitful in nature rather than benevolent, was rejected by many (and still seems to cause angst to this day). I'm keen to know what acted as the catalyst for the writing of
Messengers of Deception, and if you have thoughts on why so many in the UFO research community paint it as a betrayal of sorts?
Jacques Vallee: The evidence for an "undercurrent" of deceit behind some alleged UFO cases only becomes visible when you spend time in the field interviewing witnesses and tracking down the evidence. It became annoying to me because it represented a waste of time and a distraction from studying genuine observations. Researchers who collect reports only through books or media accounts would not necessarily encounter this level of the phenomenon and would understandably resist the suggestion that the belief in extraterrestrial intervention is being manipulated to serve political or cultist goals.