Your latest book, Confrontations, just came out this spring. Prior to that, you hadn’t been in the limelight much. What was your focus during that time?

Jacques Vallee: People assumed I had gone off to a mountaintop to philosophize. The reason that I dropped out of the UFO scene is that I wanted to do UFO investigations, and I was tired of going to meetings where the same things were continually rehashed. What it came down to was just a lot of talk. I think we’re a long way from understanding this phenomenon, and the only way we’re going to understand it is to stop talking to each other, and go back and talk to the witnesses. That’s what I wanted to do, and I wanted to do it first-hand. I wanted to be able to go to the site, meet the witnesses, and monitor what was happening over a certain period of time. So, I put the highest priority on first-hand cases that had not been reported to the press or to the UFO community because the moment the cases become part of ongoing discussion, they get polarized: the witnesses are bombarded with all kinds of questions; there are biases; the ego gets into it. I wanted to do a quiet kind of long-term research. In ten years, I accumulated over two hundred such cases. The book is really a summary of the more interesting of these cases.