Book Reviews Perceptions Magazine, July 2025
Forbidden Science 6:
Scattered Castles
The Journals of Jacques F. Vallee 2010-2019
2025, January 15th, Anomalist Books, 554 pages, Paperback US $25.16 (also Kindle $9.99)
ISBN: 978-1-949501-36-0
Review by Brent Raynes
He’s an internet pioneer, a computer scientist, an astronomer, a venture capitalist, and a well-known and respected researcher, investigator and UFO author who has traveled extensively to the ends of the world in search of the largely elusive answers to the complex UFO enigma and who served as the real-life model for the character Claude Lacombe (played by actor Francois Truffaut) in the 1977 Spielberg motion picture classic Close Encounters of the Third Kind. In the legendary French born scientist Jacques F. Vallee’s sixth volume of Forbidden Science he again shares with his followers and readers his previously most innermost personal thoughts, reflections, and details of what was going on in his unique and revealing fast paced vantage point on numerous fronts of his life as an esteemed scientist who, in his own words “traveled between those cozy, oddly pretentious business circles of Europe, and the hottest laboratories from Silicon Valley to Texas, Tokyo or Shanghai, there was the joy of expectation mixed with fear.”
Doubtless Vallee has had a remarkable and thought-provoking series of careers that makes for an extraordinary life journey. He’s certainly had a remarkable series of business and scientific career horizons and global associations with many esteemed researchers, scientists, and institutions. It was certainly a genuine honor to finally get to meet him, as well as his wife Janine, who co-authored Challenge to Science: The UFO Enigma (1966). Both of whom I had the pleasure of meeting at the December 2005 ARE (Association for Research and Enlightenment) sponsored UFO Conference at Virginia Beach, Virginia, which I soon afterwards followed up with an interview with Dr. Vallee (https://mysterious-america.com/jacquesvalleeint.html).
Vallee’s many UFO books have been uniquely fascinating and challenging, from his 1969 classic Passport to Magonia that compared the modern ufological alien phenomenon with the archetypal and historical folklore of yesteryear that was populated with angels, fairies, djinn, and many other supernatural beings. A number of Ufologists would note how even though they were sometimes at odds on various points, both controversial author John A. Keel and Vallee shared interests in similar aspects like the cattle mutilations, MIB, contactees, the psychic elements, to the point that Keel would jokingly say he was Vallee’s “ghost writer.” These private Forbidden Science journals of Vallee’s are followed by many in ufology because they provide glimpses, information, and insights that many times provide a variety of information nuggets that his numerous other books on the subject don’t give.
On the Amazon page of Forbidden Science 6 this thoughtful overview helps to lure the curious reader into its pages:
Jacques Vallee realizes why the highly classified project he joined two years earlier will never solve the many-dimensional mystery it investigates. That insight into UFO phenomena leads him into a deeper independent field exploration of cases in Brazil and Argentina, Europe and Russia. Back home in Silicon Valley, his professional fascination for new business ventures opens opportunities to draw new insights from biology and information physics.Vallee uses the literary skills of a mature diarist to introduce us to this colorful world of twenty-first century research. When the path to new solutions takes an unexpected turn, his psychic explorations enter a new domain, rich in emotional presences and esoteric insight.
We stand on the shoulders of those dedicated researchers and scientists who proceeded us, and Vallee is certainly a very shining example of such a leader.
