Forbidden Science

Their influence is far from negligible: they release bubbles of irrational imagery through the social fabric. (1964)

The true believers I am thinking of are not the bigots he was attacking but another sort of zealots, the UFO groups which clutter the inte lectual landscape, eagerly awaiting their Venusian friends.

"A committee within the Soviet Academy of Sciences has met to discuss the issue. They have concluded that the anti-science propaganda that surrounded the problem was aimed at sowing trouble among the proletariat." (7 Mar 1968)

"We are wasting our time with those turkeys. They swallow any- thing the Pentagon is telling them. The Russians are not doing any better, you know. I have just heard from Kazantsev. Maybe he wrote to you too?"

We also caught up with news of the Secret Onion. As I had surmised, John Alexander is expected to serve as the operational head and the Army will be in charge, having finally obtained the agreement of its Science Board. (1988)

After I close the dome and park the telescope I go into the darkroom to develop the film, having rehearsed every gesture so many times I am able to execute it in complete darkness. The result of all this work is a tiny blur striated with spectral lines, half the size of my fingernail. (1963)

We spent time watching television: Saturday morning cartoons are a major distraction for him, a sacred ritual that can only be interrupted under the most extreme circumstances. (1966)

I asked Ron about his involvement with Roswell. He assured me he knew a man who did radiation tests on the crashed material:
“It was amazing. He had a piece as large as this room, and he could lift it with one hand! The fellow is afraid to talk about it.” (5 Mar 1990)

Our company keeps recruiting good programmers from Europe. 1 talk to them as they get off the plane. They all say the same thing: it is not possible to be professionally alive and creative over there, in a tiny stifling world crumbling under its moldy crust. (1969)

We passed Mount Shasta, the sacred mountain, a legendary volcano covered with eternal snows. The landscape was magnificent as the storm turned savage. On the way back we drove through Redding and Red Bluff, a region I only knew from the UFO literature. (1972)

I carry my notes for Network Revolution. There is much to say about the world of computers we are building, the “solid-state society” on the distant horizon. (1979)

I must go ahead into unexplored areas. I owe it to the poor idealistic student I was a few years ago, who was so thirsty for new challenges and uncharted journeys. I cannot betray him now by resting on a few laurels. (1967)

A beautiful bird has come down from the sky and alighted in the prairie. He claimed the pond as his domain. He is a tall wild Chinese gander, majestic and proud. We hope he will stay, blessing us with the beauty of the wilderness whence he came. (1989)

Skeptic Bob Schaeffer (who has just published a scathing review of my Invisible College in Zetetic) unfairly ridicules Rhine and his “famous transparent cards” for telepathy. As if Rhine's tests were not pathetic enough with cards that are perfectly opaque. (1977)

The sky became overcast again, so we had to stop half an hour after midnight, after less than three hours of exposure, a duration which is too short for the deep-space objects we are trying to capture with the spectrograph. (1963)

It is snowing over Chicago today. In the light of State Street or the canyons of Lake Shore Drive my windshield wipers cut through a mar- vellous whiteness where the world seems delicately suspended. (1965)

The latest magazine of the pro-UFO CUFOS group is a hatchet job, with my picture on the cover: Where Vallee went wrong! The photograph dates from 15 years ago and that seems appropriate: These people have remained stuck in time. (1990)

Reading Bergier’s book on occult wars La Guerre Secrète de l’Occulte, I see he was already aware of Ingo’s role in locating ships, notably the disabled sub picked up by Hughes’ Glomar Explorer. He repeatedly mentions that a breakthrough could take place if Ingo were to train some students. (1983)

The first project was a test of the existence of tachyons involving hypothetical plant-to-plant communication. In connection with this experiment he contacted Ingo, who reoriented the project from plant telepathy to remote viewing. (1985)

In a Champs-Elysées library yesterday Simonne thumbed through Holy Blood, Holy Grail where a passage mentions General De Gaulle and a man named Plantard, presented as a key man for the right-wing Comités de Salut Public that brought him back to power. (1983)

I'm not interested in discussing the eggs, nor do I care about the scientists who “explain” them away. Let's find out who makes them, and why. (1977)

The saucers are indeed like Easter eggs. Someone got up early and scattered them around for us to discover. Then he leaked out the notion that they were extraterrestrial.

Janine has given me a fine stereo for the tower library: Now I can listen to Hildegard of Bingen while indexing cases. The people of the Dark Ages knew something powerful I try to rediscover inside myself, a mode of meditation I find intimately comfortable. (1990)

The rest of the world won't know about this for many years, although scientific opinion may be slowly swayed by such indirect evidence as may leak out. As for the public, it will continue to believe all the “New Age” garbage served up on television. (1979)

This morning I met with Udi Shapiro and an AOL executive at the law offices of Fulbright Jaworski. AOL proposes an investment in Ubique and a product licence that would launch our technology throughout the Internet. (1995)

On our way back from the Bureau of Standards we drove through those high points of saucer history, Amarillo and Lubbock, where a celebrated photograph of lights in formation was taken in the fifties. (1963)

Shel is intrigued by Ira Einhorn’s disappearance. He has a reliable source in Philadelphia who assures him the police knows perfectly well where Ira is. Shel remembers Ira visiting his home and baking cookies for his kids, in the days of their friendship. (1981)

John Mack has become a zealot for a new spiritual current, while Strieber publicizes claims of implants (which he doesn’t dare to have removed and analyzed, for fear of death...) and subtle contact with unspecified forces. I have little to contribute to either cause. (1997)

...where Simonne and I met with radio producer Cazenave, followed by a pointless visit to Matra and a good meeting with Jean-Pierre Pineau, the No. 2 executive at Air Liquide. (1983)

A well-filled day: breakfast at Deux Magots with a colleague from Infomedia-France, then a nostalgic walk around Les Halles in the morning light, smells of wet cobblestones, a visit to France-Culture...