Confrontations

Book excerpt: ASCIENTIFICDETECTIVESTORY In Confrontations, the second volume of his Alien Contact Trilogy, Dr. Jacques Vallee personally investigates forty astonishing UFO cases from around the world. He finds it shocking that professional scientists have never seriously examined this material. This book is about the hopes, experiences, and the frustrations of a scientist who has gone into the field to investigate a bizarre, seductive, and often terrifying phenomenon reported by many witnesses as a contact with an alien form of intelligence. Dr. Jacques Vallee was born in France, where he received a Bachelor of Science degree in mathematics from the Sorbonne and a Master of Science in astrophysics from the University of Lille. He began his professional life as an astronomer at the Paris Observatory in 1961. While on the staff of the French Space Committee, he witnessed the destruction of the tracking tapes of unknown objects orbiting the earth, initiating a lifelong interest in the UFO phenomenon. Vallee arrived in the U.S. in 1962, worked in astronomy at the University of Texas at Austin, and wrote two highly respected scientific examinations arguing for the Extraterrestrial Hypothesis (ETH) of UFO origins. In 1967, he received a Ph.D. in computer science from Northwestern University, where he became a close associate of J. Allen Hynek, then scientific consultant for the U.S. Air Force on Project Blue Book. Eventually concluding that the ETH was too narrow to encompass the burgeoning UFO data, he conducted his own extensive global research, resulting in the "Alien Contact Trilogy." Dr. Vallee is presently a venture capitalist living in San Francisco. His website is www.jacquesvallee.com."