Well, this didn’t go as expected.
In my last post, I described how, in the course of researching my book I had discovered the true identity of the person who inspired “Lacombe,” the French UFOlogist character in the movie Close Encounters of the Third Kind, but I didn’t drop any names, in the hopes of building up some suspense. Well, that’s all moot now, so here are the names:
The guy we all thought inspired Lacombe: real-life French UFOlogist Dr. Jacques Vallee
The guy Dr. Hynek said inspired Lacombe: real-life French UFOlogist Dr. Claude Poher
The story I thought I was going to tell in this follow-up post was about how Dr. Vallee contacted me last summer to tell me how upset he was that I put that quote in my book, and I was going to tell how he had just contacted me over the holidays, just as upset, and that he had cc’d a prominent journalist both times which made me wonder whether this whole thing was going to end up in print somewhere.
That’s the story I thought I was going to tell. But then something else happened. What happened was, when Dr. Vallee wrote to me over the holidays, I started reading between the lines. And when I did that I sensed that Dr. Vallee may have been upset because he thought that my book was officially sponsored by Dr. J. Allen Hynek’s Center for UFO Studies (CUFOS). While it’s true that Dr. Mark Rodeghier, the scientific director of he Center, gave me the opportunity to write the book, the book itself is not a CUFOS product. So, I wrote back to Dr. Vallee and explained this to him.
I knew that there had been some bad blood between Dr. Vallee and CUFOS some time ago, so it suddenly made sense to me that I should assure Dr. Vallee about the independent nature of my work.
Well, a couple weeks went by with me not knowing what might be happening, and then just yesterday I got the nicest letter from Dr. Vallee. Turned out he really was concerned that my book was being used as a vehicle for CUFOS to take pot-shots at him, and he seemed very grateful that I had cleared that up.
I wrote back to him today and we now have a very nice dialog going… No mention of the “Lacombe” affair at all! In fact, in his letters today he was complimenting my book and telling me about Volume 4 of his published personal journals, “Forbidden Science,” hinting at some of the stories he’ll be telling. I can’t wait to read it, and I hope you all will, too!