Forbidden Science 6: Scattered Castles, the Journals of Jacques Vallee, 2010–2019

will welcome this sixth installment covering the years 2010 through 2019-representing the sixth decade of his research and reminiscences on UFOs, as well as his professional career as an astronomer, computer scientist, and venture capitalist.As in the previous volumes, the book is presented as a narrative diary, essentially written at the time of the events described-although Valle has hinted that the chronicle has been enhanced from "copybooks, loose pages, letters, and marginal notes" (Valle, 1992: vii) and "notes and transcripts and bits of correspondence, or notices of events that brought back smiles or tears" (Valle, 2023: 8).The subtitle, Scattered Castles, is based on the name of a personnel security database used by the US intelligence community that logged Valle's personal info on his visit to the National Reconnaissance Office in Chantilly, Virginia, in 2010 (p.19).Metaphorically, it could also represent his accomplishments as an architect of various enterprises, from artificial intelligence to healthcare startups or the interdimensional hypothesis for UFOs.Forbidden Science 6 covers some major events in Valle's life (mourning the loss of his first wife Janine, his second marriage to Flamine, a research trip to Brazil, and conferences in Russia and Argentina) and the history of ufology (the end of the US Defense Intelligence Agency's Advanced Aerospace Weapon System Applications Program (AAWSAP), later meetings with colleagues who had been associated with the group, and the resurgence of interest in UFOs after the New York Times revealed the existence of that program in 2017).As always, Valle maintains an engaging narrative, spicing the story up with specifics of meals eaten, concerts heard, and conversations remembered, often embellished with a Gallic swathe of colorful weather reports worthy of Monet-"the weather a succulent blend of morning moisture and blue-sky spring" (p.114).He also parenthetically mentions political and world events (the fire at Notre-Dame de Paris, p. 486) that are both useful for the timeline and allow him to wax philosophical with lofty observations on the state of humanity or "lamenting the shallowness of modern spiritual movements" (p.482).Like other journals and diaries, the details are in the moment, so you will have to look elsewhere in Valle's oeuvre for detailed documentation of UFO cases or a statistical analysis of sighting patterns.But his long history of involvement in the topic, combined with his many interactions with prominent ufologists and scientists interested in paranormal phenomena, make this and the other volumes in the series a treasure trove of enlightening trivia.No other UFO autobiography, few as they are, comes close in scope and vitality to Forbidden Science.