Jacques Vallée

Jacques Fabrice Vallée (French: [vale]; born September 24, 1939) is a computer scientist, venture capitalist, author, ufologist and astronomer currently residing in San Francisco, California. In mainstream science, he began his professional life as an astronomer at the Paris Observatory. Vallée co-developed the first computerized map of Mars for NASA in 1963. He later worked on the network information center for the ARPANET, a precursor to the modern Internet, as a staff engineer of SRI International's Augmentation Research Center under Douglas Engelbart. Vallée is also an important figure in the study of unidentified flying objects (UFOs), first noted for a defense of the scientific legitimacy of the extraterrestrial hypothesis and later for promoting the interdimensional hypothesis.