Providing the inspiration for a character in a classic Steven Spielberg film is quite the large optical reflecting telescope in any astronomer’s observatory. Having that character then be played by famed French New Wave director François Truffaut is just the polish on the viewfinder.

But that’s one part of the multifaceted life of Jacques Vallée, the former astronomer, now current computer scientist, venture capitalist, and ufologist. Since being the basis for Claude Lacombe, a French government scientist in 1977’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Vallée has been researching and developing theories surrounding extraterrestrial and interdimensional phenomena.

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