Two things carry the name. The first is a working network of scientists who studied the phenomenon in private because studying it in public ended careers. The foreword to the 2014 reprint names Beckman, Powers, Price-Williams, Phillips, Guérin, Chauvin, Costa de Beauregard and Claude Poher among them. J. Allen Hynek named the group after the seventeenth-century natural philosophers whose private correspondence became the Royal Society.
The second is Jacques Vallee’s book of that title, published by E. P. Dutton in 1975 and reprinted with a new foreword by Anomalist Books in 2014. An Introduction, nine chapters and a Conclusion, written between Passport to Magonia (1969) and the field’s first statistical papers, it argues four things: that the psychic component of close encounters is the most informative part of the data rather than noise; that evidence reaches investigators through a Triple Coverup; that the messages delivered by contact events are worthless as information and effective as instruments of belief; and that the pattern is historically continuous. Those four moves converge on the Control System Hypothesis. The case material includes the Delphos Ring 1971, the Dr. X Case 1968, the UMMO Affair, the AFFA Contact 1959 transcripts and a chapter-length comparison of Fatima 1917 with landing reports. It remains the fullest statement of the position Vallée carried through the Forbidden Science journals to their final volume in 2026.
Connections
Jacques Vallee · Control System Hypothesis · J. Allen Hynek · Claude Poher · Triple Coverup · Magonia · Lourdes Apparitions 1858 · Pierre de Rudder Case 1875 · Gordon Creighton · When Prophecy Fails