Author Description

Going beyond his best-selling Alien Contact trilogy: Dimensions, Confrontations and Revelations, Forbidden Science is also the richly personal story of a young Frenchman fascinated with the stars and the sky. Vallee becomes an astrophysicist and computer scientist in the nascent French computer industry, leaving France in 1962 for the United States to pursue work in the early computer languages - and work with other scientists on the phenomenon of unidentified flying objects. When the Air Force funded a major university to evaluate sightings of UFOs in 1967, Dr. Vallee and his mentor, Professor J. Allen Hynek, were part of the first briefing. Day by day he details in this beautifully written journal how "the problem" became not just a proliferation of sightings, but a complex, layered public relations challenge. Debates developed not only on the study of these new phenomena, but on the way they were explained to the American people. Dr. Vallee reveals the process by which major American scientists already had been led astray by the intelligence community as early as 1953, for reasons that had little to do with the pursuit of scientific knowledge. Behind closed doors, and without the knowledge of the public, secret data and classified recommendations were evaluated and debated by faceless analysts. "The problem" was never studied at the high intellectual level which a phenomenon refuting so many known scientific values would seem to demand. Moving beyond the question of the possible reality of unidentified flying objects, a mystery he does not claim to explain, Dr. Vallee asks, If science refuses to deal with such topics, then what is science for? Forbidden Science questions how we use scientific research to describe anomalous phenomena in the physical world and challenges us to face our assumptions about ourselves and the tenuous concept we call reality.