The Network Revolution – confessions of a computer scientist (1982)¹ is the title which immediately springs to mind. I never see anyone else mention this book, but I liked it. One of the many interesting things it contains is an anonymized telling of what happened with Doug Engelbart and why, even after giving the dazzling “The Mother of All Demos”², the SRI company did not succeed in its grand plan for the future of computing.
It also talks a lot about very early Internet history, and gives the history of many things which I have not seen others reference, like Lee Felsenstein and Community Memory.
I suspect the book might not be well-known because its author, Jacques Vallée, it mostly known for being a ufologist. I did not know this until after I read the book, though, and the book itself does not contain any references to UFOs. I can wholeheartedly recommend the book, and it’s free to read online!¹
Later books in the same vein like Hackers and Dealers of Lightning are more well-known and seem to be appreciated by many, but this book seems to have been overlooked by most people.
I remember a book he wrote, something about "Magonia". Not sure he considered UFOs "real" but more of a collective psyche phenomenon. Actually he collected a lot of ancient stories from previous centuries: fairy tales, Mother Mary visions, strange happenings of 1800s and befor 1950... it was very entertaining.
I happen to have almost all of his ufology books including "Passport to Magonia" and you're right that he covers those subjects, but he doesn't claim it's a collective psyche phenomenon. Instead he argues that it has elements of this but guided by an external control system, which is itself part of some, for lack of a better word coming to my mind right now, extradimensional intelligence (he never makes this specific word use) that manipulates human beliefs by manifesting entities in a way that corresponds with the more general belief tendencies of any era. Thus, in ancient times, what we now call UFOs manifested as "fairy folk" and such while today the tendency is more towards temporarily physical apparitions that are made up to be "aliens", presumably because it fits better with the psychological tendencies of our current technological, space-exploring civilization. His core point though is that in both cases, we're really seeing the same extremely ancient phenomenon recur in different guises. Many nuts and bolts UFOlogists really dug into Vallee's ideas because of this, but to me at least, it actually makes a lot more sense than UFO's being aliens in the classical Hollywood, scifi sense of the word. Their behavior makes no discernible sense in that context.
Take him with a grain of salt, since he's just a single researcher in a big field laden with quackery and crackpots but I thought his approach and reasoning were refreshingly clear headed. I recommend his other UFOlogy books very much at least for the sake of entertaining curiosity about something many people don't read about often.
Essnetially (and i'm really boiling it down here) he argues two main points and connects them to form that conclusion:
First, that the wider phenomenon clearly shows evidence of being a tangible thing with highly varied but in certain ways similar physical manifestations across an enormous span of human history. This is a thing which weakens the probability of it merely being iconography based on individual psychology or myth making.
Secondly, this being the case, those widespread, long-running physical manifestations indicate something more subtle than mere UFO visits that only began during recent history.
Ergo, we're looking at something external, at least partially physical and because it has affected our belief systems and legends, and thus quite possibly a sort of control system. (This last one is a bit more of a leap but the first two main arguments are covered fairly well in his books).
Vallee is fantastic, and I would strongly recommend his books on UFOs as well. He's the kind of serious & careful researcher we need when it comes to studying complex problems that less serious people deny even exist, & his work stands out as reasonable and of excellent quality even compared to folks like Keel.
Like Keel, Vallee gets attacked by people who don't read him on two sides: by the people who are quite sure that UFOs are extraterrestrial visitors, and by the people who are equally quite sure that UFOs are the lies of con artists and the delusions of madmen. Neither explanation holds up to serious scrutiny.
> I remember reading about Lee Felsenstein and Community Memory in Hackers:
You’re right, I misremembered; there’s nothing about Lee Felsenstein or Community Memory in The Network Revolution. The story about Doug Engelbart is definitely in there, though.
It also talks a lot about very early Internet history, and gives the history of many things which I have not seen others reference, like Lee Felsenstein and Community Memory.
I suspect the book might not be well-known because its author, Jacques Vallée, it mostly known for being a ufologist. I did not know this until after I read the book, though, and the book itself does not contain any references to UFOs. I can wholeheartedly recommend the book, and it’s free to read online!¹
Later books in the same vein like Hackers and Dealers of Lightning are more well-known and seem to be appreciated by many, but this book seems to have been overlooked by most people.
1. https://books.google.com/books?id=6f8VqnZaPQwC&pg=PS1
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mother_of_All_Demos