- Vallee, Jacques.
Forbidden Science. Vol. 2.
San Francisco: Documatica Research, 2008.
ISBN 978-0-615-24974-2.
-
This, the second volume of
Jacques Vallee's journals,
chronicles the years from 1970 through 1979. (I read the
first volume, covering
1957–1969, before I began this list.) Early in the narrative
(p. 153), Vallee becomes a U.S. citizen, but although
surrendering his French passport, he never gives up his Gallic
rationalism and scepticism, both of which serve him well in the
increasingly weird Northern California scene in the Seventies. It was
in those locust years that the seeds for the personal computing and
Internet revolutions matured, and Vallee was at the nexus of this
technological ferment, working on databases, Doug Englebart's
Augmentation project, and later systems for conferencing and
collaborative work across networks. By the end of the decade he, like
many in Silicon Valley of the epoch, has become an entrepreneur,
running a company based upon the conferencing technology he
developed. (One amusing anecdote which indicates how far we've come
since the 70s in mindset is when he pitches his conferencing system to
General Electric who, at the time, had the largest commercial data
network to support their timesharing service. They said they were
afraid to implement anything which looked too much like a messaging
system for fear of running afoul of the Post Office.)
If this were purely a personal narrative of the formative
years of the Internet and personal computing, it would
be a valuable book—I was there, then, and Vallee
gets it absolutely right. A journal is, in many ways,
better than a history because you experience the groping
for solutions amidst confusion and ignorance which is
the stuff of real life, not the narrative of an historian
who knows how it all came out. But in addition to being
a computer scientist, entrepreneur, and (later)
venture capitalist, Vallee is also one of the
preeminent researchers into the UFO and related
paranormal phenomena (the character Claude Lacombe,
played by François Truffaut in Steven Spielberg's
1977 movie
Close Encounters of the Third Kind
was based upon Vallee). As the 1970s progress, the author
becomes increasingly convinced that the UFO phenomenon cannot
be explained by extraterrestrials and spaceships, and that it is
rooted in the same stratum of the human mind and the universe
we inhabit which has given rise to folklore about little
people and various occult and esoteric traditions. Later in the decade,
he begins to suspect that at least some UFO activity is
the work of deliberate manipulators bent on creating an
irrational, anti-science worldview in the general populace,
a hypothesis expounded in his 1979 book,
Messengers of Deception,
which remains controversial three decades after its
publication.
The Bay Area in the Seventies was a kind of cosmic vortex of
the weird, and along with Vallee we encounter many of the
prominent figures of the time, including
Uri Geller
(who Vallee immediately dismisses as a charlatan),
Doug Engelbart,
J. Allen Hynek,
Anton LaVey,
Russell Targ,
Hal Puthoff,
Ingo Swann,
Ira Einhorn,
Tim Leary,
Tom Bearden,
Jack Sarfatti,
Melvin Belli,
and many more. Always on a relentlessly rational even keel, he
observes with dismay as many of his colleagues disappear
into drugs, cults, gullibility, pseudoscience, and fads
as that dark decade takes its toll. In May 1979
he feels himself to be at “the end of an age that defied
all conventions but failed miserably to set new standards”
(p. 463). While this is certainly spot on in the social and
cultural context in which he meant it, it is ironic that so many
of the standards upon which the subsequent explosion of computer
and networking technology are based were created in those years
by engineers patiently toiling away in Silicon Valley amidst all
the madness.
An introduction and retrospective at the end puts the work into
perspective from the present day, and 25 pages of end notes expand
upon items in the journals which may be obscure at this remove and
provide source citations for events and works mentioned. You might
wonder what possesses somebody to read more than five hundred pages of
journal entries by somebody else which date from thirty to forty years
ago. Well, I took the time, and I'm glad I did: it perfectly
recreated the sense of the times and of the intellectual and
technological challenges of the age. Trust me: if you're too young to
remember the Seventies, it's far better to experience those years here
than to have actually lived through them.
October 2009 