legendary UFO researcher Jacques Vallee on Uri Geller

Our good friend, legendary UFO researcher Jacques Vallee, recently appeared on the always interesting Skeptiko podcast, discussing his 50+ years of investigating the UFO phenomenon, as well as his lesser known involvement in parapsychology research. As you’d expect, the interview is fascinating, and along the way there’s some wonderful anecdotes.

One such story has Jacques discussing some testing of Uri Geller that he was involved with at Stanford Research Institute (SRI). Taking a break after a successful test, Vallee and Geller were sitting together at a table in the SRI cafeteria, and decided to do a further test of telepathy using one of the left over envelopes from the experiment. But Jacques decided to change things up, and instead of using the content of the envelope, he instead thought up his own imagery:

Dr. Jacques Vallée: I thought, I’m going to send it in two things… I’m going to send a fish and I’m going to send a water jet (fountain) that I see through the window. Geller said – all of a sudden he was all business – he took his pencil and he drew something and he says, “Look, I’m going to draw what I’m getting, but I’m not getting one thing, I’m getting two things. I’m getting a fish and then I’m getting a water jet.” So he drew the two things, he didn’t draw the target. There was no way he could have known that I did not send him the target, I sent him two things that I made up, and that’s what he got.

Now, it’s almost hard to believe that all this happened exactly the way he’s saying, I mean, this is Jacques Vallée and everything, but come on. Well, here’s the real kicker. He wrote it all down in his journal. So here’s a guy, who’s right in the middle of the computer revolution in Silicon Valley, a world-class computer scientist at the time, and he’s right in the middle of the parapsychology thing, and right in the middle of the UFO thing, and he wrote it all down.

Click here to listen to the podcast