Name: Spielberg Based a Character in Closer Encounters on Jacques Valle
Uploaded: 2020-12-04T23:03:00.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Spielberg Based a Character in Closer Encounters on Jacques Valle' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2020-12-04. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Spielberg Based a Character in Closer Encounters on Jacques Valle' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2020-12-04. Transcript available.

The Joe Rogan Experience
Jacques Vallée, 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.
So 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 is 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 U.S.
trying to make sense of this in the military and so on.
So he needed this intermediate character.
He thought, you know, Frenchman was the 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. Journalists put us together when about halfway through the, you know, the
final shooting of the film.
And there were, there were gaps in the movie at that point.
And we, we, so we had lunch twice together and it was, was a lot of fun.
He was, at the time he was looking for a transition between the time when they,
they know the, you know, the big thing is coming.
The mother ship is coming and they don't know where, and the mother ship is
sending signals, but they can't decipher the signals.
And I, he said, you know, he had spent the morning at the, 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 could have, you know, two screens that give you an
angle and, and the angle tells you where the thing is.
And he said, no, that's too complicated, you know, and takes too long, right?
It, you know, it's got to be just a few minutes in the film.
And then I, I thought of a photograph that was on the desk of Dr. Hynek, you
know, Dr. J. Hynek, 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, they were putting the string
over the earth.
And I, I, I told Dr. Hynek, I said, Alan, you know, what's the story behind
this?
And, and he said, well, the, when the first Sputnik was launched, you know,
October 57, nobody had a computer program to compute an orbit.
But they knew where the, 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 they, 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, they were trying to compute the orbit by putting a string around the,
around the model of the earth in the lobby of the, of Harvard.
And I thought it was so funny.
And, and Spielberg said, that's it, you know, that's it.
The general says, come on, you know, you know, the, the geographer who is the
interpreter of the French, of a 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, the general says, you mean, we've got $10 billion worth of radar and,
you know, 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, and they've got the globe and they, they look at it, look at it
and get their coordinates.
And because they, the, it turns out the geographer tells them, you know, those
signals, they look like a longitude and a latitude.
So they, they, they, they, you know, they, they get the point where it's going
to be.
And that's, that was a piece that was missing in, in the movie.
So I was really proud of that.
You know, it was, it was really fun.
Well, so it's the one funny part in the movie.
Yeah.
It's a great movie and it's a, 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, what do they care who the government is?
Like if, if I was looking at an ant colony, I'm not going to ask the ant colony,
which one's the, 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, by, and told that those things don't exist.
So they don't, they don't talk.
So they'll talk to, you know, people like you, people like me, because they
trust, you know, they, they trust me.
And in Silicon Valley, you know, you wouldn't 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, and the government isn't getting that.
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