Jacques Vallée

French Internet pioneer, computer scientist, venture capitalist, author, ufologist and astronomer.

His scientific career began as a professional astronomer at the Paris Observatory. Vallée co-developed the first computerized map of Mars for NASA in 1963. He later worked on the network information center for the ARPANET, a precursor to the modern Internet, as a staff engineer of SRI International's Augmentation Research Center (ARC) under Douglas Engelbart.

Vallée is also an important figure in the study of unidentified flying objects (UFOs), and unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAPs). Vallée was first noted for his defense of the scientific legitimacy of the extraterrestrial hypothesis and later for promoting the interdimensional hypothesis.