Dr Jacques Vallée was born in France where he was trained in astrophysics, moved to the US to receive his PH.D in computer sciences in 1967 at Northwestern University where he was a close associate of the late Dr Allen Hynek. Many years before the Internet, his team developed the first computer conferencing system on a worldwide computer network. He is the author of numerous articles and three books about high technology, but is perhaps best known for his best-selling books on the UFO phenomenon, the Alien Contact trilogy, “Dimensions”, “Confrontations” and “Revelations”, and a landmark study “UFO Chronicles of the Soviet Union”. Travelling around the world investigating UFO incidents, he was the real-life model for the character of the French scientist played by Francois Truffaut in Spielberg's “Close Encounters of the Third Kind”. In his keynote address “Forbidden Science: Myth and Reality in UFO Phenomena” he will review both the historical evidence and current cases that have led him to state that UFOs represented a genuine new phenomenon. He speculates that it centres on a technology that is able to manipulate the physical environment and the psychic reality of the witnesses. He argues that this technology is not necessarily extraterrestrial in nature and that the serious analysis of UFO reports could give science important new insights.