Spielberg Based a Character in Closer Encounters on Jacques Valle

Jacques Vallee, you have been studying this most of your life Too long Too long We discussed it last night at dinner that your interest in this came from an experience that you actually had as a child You actually saw a UFO As a teenager with two other witnesses one of the witnesses was half a mile away with binoculars I'm pretty sure that that object was real and it was a classic disc middle of the afternoon, clear sky absolutely clear At the time I became convinced that it might be a prototype of something that would be coming out later and, you know, we're here many years later and we still don't have anything like that It was just hovering and it was there And you've been studying this for so long and this was something you guys talked about in the film that you were actually the character that the French UFO researcher in Close Encounters of the First Kind or the third kind rather was modeled after the Steven Spielberg film Spielberg was intrigued with the idea of a character that was not quite as weird as, you know, the ETs but was a lot weirder than, you know, the people on the ground in the US trying to make sense of this in the military and so on So he needed this intermediate character He thought, you know, a Frenchman was a right thing to do And so did you talk to him about the film? Did you talk to him about when he was putting it together? Yeah, a journalist put us together when about halfway through the, you know, the final shooting of the film and there were gaps in the movie at that point And we, so we had lunch twice together and it was a lot of fun He was, at the time he was looking for a transition between the time when they know that, you know, the big thing is coming the mothership is coming and they don't know where and the mothership is sending signals but they can't decipher the signals And he said, you know, he had spent the morning at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and he said he couldn't make any sense of all the mathematics they had And I said, well, maybe you can have, you know, two screens that give you an angle and the angle tells you where the thing is And he said, now that's too complicated, you know, and takes too long It's got to be just a few minutes in the film And then I thought of a photograph that was on the desk of Dr. Heineck You know, Dr. J.E. Heineck, who was the Air Force consultant on UFOs at the time and I was working with him, building databases and so on And on that photograph, there were three guys, you know, really well-dressed on ladders around a huge sphere of the Earth in the lobby of some building somewhere with pieces of string that they were putting the string over the Earth And I told Dr. Heineck, I said, Alan, you know, what's the story behind this? And he said, well, when the first Sputnik was launched, you know, October 57 nobody had a computer program to compute an orbit But they knew where the Sputnik had been seen Nobody expected the Russians to come up with this And they needed to know where it was going next So the New York Times called the director of Harvard Observatory saying can you give us a comment on the Russian satellite? And the guy said, hey, it's three o'clock in the morning, you know, what Russian satellite? And so they got dressed in a hurry And they were trying to compute the orbit by putting a string around the model of the Earth in the lobby of Harvard And I thought it was so funny And Spielberg said, that's it, you know, that's it The general says, come on, you know, the geographer who is the interpreter of the French guy says, well, it looks like it's somewhere in Wyoming, you know But where in Wyoming, you know, where should we go? And the general says, you mean we've got $10 billion worth of radar and cameras and everything else Nobody's got a map of Wyoming And they break into the lobby of the building next door And they come back with this globe And, you know, they've got the globe and they look at it and get their coordinates And because it turns out the geographer tells them, you know, those signals They look like a longitudinal attitude So they get the point where it's going to be And that was a piece that was missing in the movie So I was really proud of that, you know, it was really fun Also, it's the one funny part in the movie Yeah, it's a great movie And it is probably the movie that got me most excited about UFOs when I was a kid And I remember thinking, if UFOs were coming here from another planet One thing that I remember thinking is, why would they even bother talking to the government? Like, what do they care who the government is? Like, if I was looking at an ant colony I'm not going to ask the ant colony which one's the elected official that's in charge of all the other ants You don't give a shit, you're just like trying to study the ants And I felt like if something was coming here from another planet that was so sophisticated It could either travel from another dimension or travel from another galaxy Why would it care like who the president is or who the generals are? You know, not only that, but the witnesses don't talk to the government either You know, by now the witnesses are tired of being ridiculed by scientists And, you know, and told that those things don't exist So they don't talk So they'll talk to, you know, people like you or people like me Because they trust, you know, they trust me And in Silicon Valley, you know, you even believe the number of people who come to me You know, including CEOs of companies that I've worked with Who tell me about sightings that people in their family have had or sightings they had Including, you know, sightings in Vietnam, for example, and so on When they were in the military that have never been reported And the government isn't getting that Catch new episodes of The Joe Rogan Experience for free only on Spotify Watch back catalog JRE videos on Spotify Including clips easily, seamlessly switch between video and audio experience On Spotify, you can listen to the JRE in the background while using other apps And can download episodes to save on data costs all for free Spotify is absolutely free You don't have to have a premium account to watch new JRE episodes You just need to search for the JRE on your Spotify app Go to Spotify now to get this full episode of The Joe Rogan Experience