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Guest Name
JACQUES VALLÉE and PAOLA HARRIS
Guest Occupation
Jacques Vallée, Internet pioneer, computer scientist, venture capitalist, author, ufologist, astronomer, and award-winning UFO researcher
Guest Biography

Jacques Vallée, Internet pioneer, computer scientist, venture capitalist, author, ufologist, astronomer, and award-winning UFO researcher, with Paola Harris, a photojournalist, Investigative Reporter, and widely published author.

Paola Leopizzi Harris is an Investigative Reporter and widely published author. She holds a BA in English and French from Rhode Island College and a Bachelor of Science from the University of Colorado. Her Master’s Degree in Education is from Leslie College in Boston. She served as the Principal for The American Overseas School of Rome in 1994 -1995 and taught Ancient History, photo journalism and English there until returning to the United States in 2007 to pursue her interests in investigative reporting in the field of Unidentified Phenomena Research.  

Jacques F.Vallee studied at the Sorbonne and received an MS in astrophysics at Lille University. His early writings earned him the Jules Verne Prize for a science fiction novel in French. Coming to the University of Texas as an astronomer, he co-developed the first computer-based map of Mars for NASA, then moved to Northwestern University where he earned a PhD in artificial intelligence (1968) and served as a close associate of Dr. J. Allen Hynek, the USAF scientific consultant on unidentified flying objects under Project BlueBook. The character of the French scientist played by François Truffaut in Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind is based on Vallée.