Jacques Vallée and the Psychology of the Unknown: UFOs, Consciousness, and the Need for Meaning
Saturday, August 23, 2025.
Most UFO researchers chase hardware: saucers, propulsion systems, and the occasional green alien with big eyes. Jacques Vallée went after something stranger — the way these sightings reflect the human mind.
Born in France in 1939, Vallée trained as an astronomer and computer scientist. He worked on the technology that would eventually become the internet, which should have earned him a safe life as a respectable scientist.
Instead, he took a sharp turn into the murky business of UFOs. But Vallée wasn’t interested in proving that we’re being visited by extraterrestrials.
His heresy was more subtle: UFOs might be real enough as experiences, but they were also psychological, symbolic events — mirrors more than machines.
A Scientist in the Margins
Vallée started as a cataloguer of stars. He was trained to spot patterns in data, and when he applied the same eye to UFO reports, he found they didn’t behave like spacecraft at all.
They changed shape, messed with time, and echoed older stories of fairies and demons.
In Passport to Magonia (1969), he argued that UFOs were a modern version of an old phenomenon: the same uncanny presence that villagers once described as sprites or angels, dressed up now in the trappings of modern technology.
Tricksters in the Sky
This idea irritated everyone. Believers wanted saucers. Skeptics wanted hoaxes. Vallée gave them tricksters.
To him, UFOs seemed to morph to fit the culture observing them. Medieval peasants saw luminous beings in the woods; Cold War pilots saw metallic discs; today’s Navy officers see tic-tac-shaped objects darting on radar. The phenomenon adapts, like a lucid dream shifting to keep us engaged.
It sounds whimsical until you remember how the unconscious works.
Dreams, intrusive thoughts, trauma — all of them arrive in the form of symbols. They don’t hand you a report; they hand you a riddle. Vallée suspected UFOs belonged to the same category: events that insist on meaning but refuse to resolve into fact.
Therapy and the Unknown
What made Vallée unusual was not just his theory, but his method. He didn’t mock witnesses or try to debunk them. He listened. He treated their stories seriously, even when he couldn’t explain them.
That stance looks a lot like therapy. Clients bring impossible-seeming experiences all the time — recurring nightmares, compulsions that feel alien, memories that may or may not be accurate.
The therapist’s job isn’t to scoff. It’s to make the experience usable, to find its meaning. Vallée applied the same courtesy to UFO witnesses.
The Balanced Skeptic
Vallée refused to give people a neat answer. The phenomenon, he argued, was designed to resist one. Its purpose was to unsettle us, to force new ways of thinking. That infuriated the camps on both sides: the skeptics found him too credulous, the believers found him too evasive.
But his point was that mystery itself is instructive.
Why Vallée Still Matters
Now that governments are cautiously admitting pilots keep seeing strange things, Vallée’s work looks freshly relevant. He reminds us that the real question may not be what’s in the sky, but how humans respond when they meet the unexplainable.
That is therapy’s territory. Whether the mystery is a traumatic memory, a failing relationship, or lights that won’t leave your imagination, the work is the same: hold the unknown long enough to make meaning out of it.
Vallée’s legacy is maybe less about UFOs than about the discipline of listening when souls are challenged to describe the unbelievable.
Which makes him, oddly enough, less a ufologist than a kind of cultural therapist — helping us face the tricksters that visit us in the night, whether they come as saucers, dreams, or fears.
Be Well, Stay Kind, and Godspeed.
REFERENCES:
Vallée, J. (1969). Passport to Magonia: From folklore to flying saucers. Chicago: Henry Regnery.
Vallée, J. (1990). Confrontations: A scientist’s search for alien contact. New York: Ballantine Books.
Vallée, J., & Aubeck, C. (2009). Wonders in the sky: Unexplained aerial objects from antiquity to modern times. New York: Tarcher.
Partridge, C. (2005). UFO religions. London: Routledge.