THE BOOK
Forbidden Science 7: Final Report. The Journals of Jacques Vallée, 2020-2025, by Jacques F. Vallée, Anomalist Books, 2026. The seventh and final volume of the published journals, covering 11 January 2020 to 27 October 2025.
What the book is
Forbidden Science 7 is the last volume of Jacques Vallée’s published journals, and the subtitle states the case plainly: Final Report. It runs across three Parts, “The Days of COVID” (2020 to 2021), “Closures and Disclosures” (2022 to mid-2024) and “The Narrow Path” (mid-2024 to late 2025), and it follows Vallée from the age of 80 to 86. The book opens inside a pandemic and closes with a sunset over an Italian lake.
In the Introduction Vallée casts himself as Pimen, the aged monk writing his chronicle from a cell in Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov, and plants the suspense the whole book then carries: that it is “only about 2025” that clear answers emerged, “disturbing in their exactness.” Much of reading this book is waiting to find out what that answer is. This note treats the volume as the site treats any firsthand account, evidence tier 1: the documentary facts in it are checkable, and the larger claims carry whatever support Vallée gives them, which in places is a great deal and in places is his word alone.
Who wrote it
Vallée is the most unusual figure in the field, which is what makes the journals worth reading whatever you conclude about the phenomenon. He is a French-American computer scientist and astronomer, an early principal investigator on ARPANET, the ancestor of the internet, and a veteran Silicon Valley venture capitalist. He is also the real scientist Steven Spielberg drew on for the French researcher Lacombe in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. He has kept a diary since 1957 and published it in instalments as Forbidden Science. This is the seventh, and the last.
He is hard to place because he refuses both camps. He does not argue that aliens are visiting in spacecraft, and he is not a debunker. That third position is why the disclosure movement treats him as a cautious ally while reductionist scientists treat him as a heretic. It is also why his journals are unusually honest: a man who pleases neither side has less reason to flatter either.
The shape of it
The book is woven from two strands, and the braid is its method. The outer strand is a world sliding into disorder: COVID from the 2020 lockdowns to its official end in May 2023, the 2022 war in Ukraine, the two US elections and the return of Trump, the 2023 collapse of Silicon Valley Bank and Credit Suisse, the AI boom set off by ChatGPT, the visible decline of San Francisco and of France, and the militarisation of space. The inner strand is a life’s research reaching its end: the Stanford materials work, the Trinity crash-debris book and its sober deflation, the loss of a database he designed, the public UAP hearings, and finally the “2025 answers.”
A small formal device holds it together. From 7 March 2020 the diary counts the pandemic by the day, “Day 1,” then on past “Day 1000,” until a Tahiti entry marks the “official end of COVID” at Day 1158 and the count quietly stops. It nails the scattered entries to one irreversible human timeline, and it gives the confinement the feel of a prisoner marking a wall.
The man, and the diary
Read only for UFO intelligence, this book loses half of what makes it worth reading. It is, before anything else, a great diarist’s self-portrait in the dusk of a life.
The ageing is concrete and unsettling. A bout of Transient Global Amnesia in 2021, the man who studies anomalies in other people’s brains watching his own fail for an afternoon. Lungs that nearly give out on a hilltop in 2022. Hearing loss, dizziness, small accidents of distraction. The title of the final Part, “The Narrow Path,” comes from a line by his friend Kit Green, “You alone walk the narrow path,” which Vallée extends to its end: even the narrow path runs out.
Two women anchor his emotional world. Janine is the wife he lost in 2010, whom he had known for sixty-two years, and who returns through dreams and through mediums; every January the death-anniversaries of his parents and of Janine fall within forty-eight hours, the hardest passage of his year. Flamine is his present companion and the book’s source of warmth. After painful separations the two remarry on a hill above San Francisco Bay in November 2022, and Vallée writes that no church could have beaten “the wide expanse of the Bay beyond Alcatraz.” It is the emotional summit of the book.
And the friends keep going. Douglas Trumbull, his brother Gabriel at 98, the physicist Peter Sturrock at 100, the comic artist Jack Katz, and more. Vallée sees each of them off with the same line from Jacques Brel, “Que sont mes amis devenus?” Over and over he returns to one image, the setting sun, vast and indifferent, that “ignores us, her own creatures.” It is the book’s recurring chord, and it becomes its last.
Disclosure as a deeper cover-up
This is where Vallée breaks from almost everyone writing about UAP today, and it is the thread most relevant to the rest of this site.
As “disclosure” became a public event across 2022 and 2023, the hearings, the David Grusch whistleblower testimony, the headlines, Vallée read it with deep suspicion. His thesis, sharpened over the book, is that real disclosure is not being withheld for the right moment. The disclosure is itself the cover-up, a second layer laid deeper than the first. He describes the likely product as a thin layer of fact “mixed into tons of fabrication, released through a compliant media.” To a Senate intelligence-committee staffer in 2023 he put the danger plainly: if the hearings only make the information “blacker than before,” everyone loses.
When the Pentagon’s All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office released its report in March 2024, denying aliens, crash retrievals and any cover-up, social media erupted. Vallée was not surprised. On his reading it fit the pattern exactly: an official denial is the form a deeper concealment would be expected to take.
Two things are worth separating here, in the site’s usual way. The public record, the hearings, the Grusch testimony, the AARO report and the fury that met it, is documented and is not in dispute. The interpretation, that all of this is the second phase of a concealment, is Vallée’s, argued from fifty years inside these programmes rather than demonstrated from a document. He is candid that it is a reading. It is a serious one, and it deserves to be weighed rather than dismissed, but it is a reading.
The substance: materials, a lost database, and the shell game
The most checkable parts of the book are its research threads, and they show Vallée at his most disciplined.
The materials work with the Stanford immunologist Garry Nolan and the NASA physicist Larry Lemke produced two peer-reviewed papers in Elsevier’s Progress in Aerospace Sciences: the first, on the Council Bluffs and Ubatuba samples, in 2022, and a second, on a 1966 high-energy light event at Haynesville, Louisiana, in 2024. Whatever one makes of the cases, getting this subject through peer review at all is a real and unusual achievement.
What sets Vallée apart is what he does with evidence that cuts against him. The metal “bracket” from the Trinity case, his own crash-debris book, was tested and retested and showed, in his words, “no hint of advanced manufacturing”; the mysterious fibres inside it turned out to be ordinary rayon or nylon. He prints the deflation as plainly as he prints the claims, and even turns the suspicion on himself. Authors in this field rarely publish the evidence against their own books. He does.
The most personally painful thread is Capella, the worldwide UAP database he designed inside the Pentagon’s AAWSAP programme. By his account it had gathered some 260,000 records before BAASS was cut after two years and the later phases, the cleaning and the actual AI, were never built. A copy of that unfinished database later leaked into private hands, and Vallée, who knows the field’s appetite for raw data, compares releasing it to handing out “a few kilos of unprocessed, highly radioactive material.” He decided not to sue, not to surrender his own private work, and to stop keeping the journals.
Around all this he traces what he calls a shell game, the churn of official bodies, AATIP to AAWSAP to UAPTF to AARO, “a fifth reorganisation within a year,” and he is careful to correct the public record where it has drifted, including on what AATIP actually was and was not. Against the bureaucratic noise he sets the slow, capitalised, academic turn led by Nolan’s SOL Foundation, from its inaugural Stanford conference in 2023 to the gathering at Baveno on Lake Maggiore in 2025 where the book ends.
The 2025 answer, and why this note will not spoil it
The Introduction promised an answer, “disturbing in its exactness.” It arrives across the final Part, and it is not a single manifesto but a set of declarations that lean the same way. Out of respect for the book, and because the reveal is the reason to read it, this note will sketch the shape and leave the substance where it belongs.
The direction is this. After a lifetime chasing metal, propulsion and isotopes, Vallée concludes that the answer was never in the hardware. He turns toward consciousness, toward what he describes as interaction across higher dimensions, and toward a continuity with ancient tradition that he finds, near the end, “disturbing” in how exactly it lines up. He reframes the small “aliens” of the famous cases as something closer to proxies rather than the visitors themselves. At the Balboa Café in 2025, arguing with a National Academy of Sciences physicist, he gives the control-system idea its highest statement: the phenomenon is not passive, it “reprocesses human consciousness to fit realities we don’t comprehend.” And on his 86th birthday, after the science has taken him as far as it can, he writes a single quiet line: “I already have all the answers I need.”
Here the site’s caution matters most, and Vallée would not disagree. The load-bearing supports under this answer are private and unverifiable: a pseudonymous psychic, an entity said to communicate “in combinations of light,” an expectation that craft could “materialise in the sea” and emerge later as solid objects. Vallée knows it. He calls the journals “one man’s special view of a vast, unknown field,” not a claim of judgement. The answer is best read as the considered intuition of a serious mind at the end of a long road, not as a result. That is precisely why it belongs in the book rather than in a summary of it.
What the book documents
That AAWSAP existed and that Vallée designed its data warehouse; the two peer-reviewed Progress in Aerospace Sciences papers and their authorship; the deflation of the Trinity bracket to ordinary fibres and no sign of advanced manufacture; the chronology of the 2022 to 2024 hearings, the Grusch testimony and the March 2024 AARO denial; the formation and trajectory of the SOL Foundation from Stanford in 2023 to Baveno in 2025. These are checkable against the public record and against the papers themselves.
It also documents, as literature, a life: the remarriage above the Bay, the long roll-call of dead friends, the failing body, the French and American research traditions seen from the rare position of someone at home in both.
What rests on Vallée’s account
That official “disclosure” is the second phase of a deeper cover-up: a serious interpretation, argued from long experience, not shown from a document. That the captured “aliens” are low-grade biological proxies and the real intelligence operates across higher dimensions: drawn from private psychic sources and from Vallée’s own synthesis, offered as his conclusion rather than as evidence. That the answer is “in line with proven traditions”: a reading he finds compelling and presents as such. The book is honest about which is which, and so is this note.
What it establishes, and what it leaves open
As a firsthand record, Forbidden Science 7 is the most candid self-portrait the field has produced: a chronicle of six years that sets a global plague beside a private one, a working scientist’s ledger of two peer-reviewed papers and one honestly deflated artefact, and the closing statement of a body of thought that pushes the UFO question off hardware and onto consciousness. The documentary facts hold up. The final answer does not resolve into something you can test, and Vallée, to his credit, never pretends otherwise.
The book ends not with a revelation in a hangar but with an 86-year-old flying out of a quiet conference at dusk, watching the light fall over the hills of Piedmont. It closes on that sunset, and then on a single asterisk alone on the page. After sixty-eight years and seven volumes, it is a strangely gentle way to sign off one of the longest searches of the modern age.
Read the book. Decide for yourself.
References and further reading
- Forbidden Science 7: Final Report. The Journals of Jacques Vallée, 2020-2025, Jacques F. Vallée, Anomalist Books, 2026 (anomalistbooks.com)
- Earlier volumes: Forbidden Science 1 to 6, Jacques F. Vallée
- Nolan, Vallée, Jiang and Lemke, materials analysis paper, Progress in Aerospace Sciences, Vol. 128, 2022
- Vallée and colleagues, the 1966 Haynesville, Louisiana case, Progress in Aerospace Sciences, 2024
- AARO, Report on the Historical Record of US Government Involvement with UAP, Volume 1, March 2024, media.defense.gov
- David Grusch, testimony to the House Oversight subcommittee on national security, 26 July 2023
- The SOL Foundation, sol-foundation.org
- Trinity: The Best-Kept Secret, Jacques Vallée and Paola Harris, 2021
- On Vallée and Close Encounters of the Third Kind: the Lacombe character, dir. Steven Spielberg, 1977