UFOs Generals, Pilots, and Government Officials Go on the Record (22 page)

This first phase, from 1977 to 1983, reached three basic conclusions, which still remain valid:

• The vast majority of UFO reports can be explained after rigorous analysis.
  

• However, some phenomena cannot be explained in terms of conventional physics, psychology, or social psychology.
  

• It seems highly probable that this small percentage of unidentified aerospace phenomena have a physical basis.
  

I gradually developed an expertise in these studies, and beginning in 1983 was placed in charge of GEPAN. Following these initial steps, we undertook to develop a more theoretical but still rigorous approach to these studies. It was clear at the outset that it would be necessary to consider both the physical and psychological nature of the phenomenon. In order to fully understand a witness’s narrative account, we had to evaluate not only the stated report but also the personality and state-of-mind of the witness, the physical environment in which the event occurred, and the witness’s psychosocial environment. GEPAN created a database, unique in the world, of all the cases of sightings of aerospace phenomena recorded by the French authorities since 1951, allowing for statistical analysis.

A classification was adopted that places the UAP (unidentified aerospace phenomena) in four categories:

Type A: The phenomenon is fully and unambiguously identified.

Type B: The nature of the phenomenon has probably been identified but some doubt remains.

Type C: The phenomenon cannot be identified or classified due to insufficient data.

Type D: The phenomenon cannot be explained despite precise witness accounts and good-quality evidence recovered from the scene.

In Type D cases, those which remain unexplained, a subcategorization was also adopted using the “Close Encounters” classification established by Dr. J. Allen Hynek, based on the sighting distance and the effects generated by the phenomenon.

These on-the-spot investigations, carried out at the request of the police or the civil and military aviation authorities, followed by scientific analysis, made it possible to confirm the existence of rare physical phenomena, classified as unexplained UAP, that do not conform to any known natural or artificial phenomena. The statistical analyses and the surveys carried out since the creation of the GEPAN make this even clearer. The Type D category contained more cases during some unusual periods, called “waves,” like the wave of 1954, when nearly 40 percent of the cases in the database belong to this last category.

GEPAN initiated several lines of research involving other laboratories and consultants in countries where similar events were occurring, which allowed for comparison with additional files and databases. We worked on developing improved detection systems, such as image analysis of photographs and video footage.

In 1988, GEPAN became a new agency called SEPRA
⁴
in order to broaden the mission to include the investigation of all reentry phenomena, including debris from satellites, launches, etc. When an unidentified object left traces or any kind of marked effect on the environment that could be recorded and measured by sensors or instruments, we referred to them as UFOs. Among the physical trace ground cases that have been thoroughly investigated, three have stood up to a rigorous analysis and could not be categorized as involving known objects.

In November 1979, a woman called the gendarmes to say a flying saucer had just landed in front of her house. The gendarmes went to the reported landing site immediately, and GEPAN came also with a multidisciplinary team of investigators. Another witness provided an independent account of an object alighting. The visible trace evidence included a grassy area flattened in a uniform direction, and plant physiology analysis was subsequently carried out by a respected university. Since this was the first time we had collected soil and plant samples from a presumed landing case, rigorous protocols had not yet been established for their analysis, and no significant results were obtained.

However, that changed with the Trans-en-Provence case, one of the best known cases in France. Around 5:00 p.m. on January 8, 1981, electrician Renato Nicolai was building a small water pump shelter in his garden on a sunny afternoon. He heard a low whistling sound coming from above. Upon turning around, he saw an ovoid object in the sky that approached the terrace at the bottom of the garden and landed. The witness moved forward cautiously to observe the strange phenomenon from behind a shed, but, within a minute, the object rose and moved away in the same direction from which it had arrived. It continued to emit a low whistle. As it flew away, Nicolai saw two round protrusions on the underside that he said looked like landing gear. He approached the scene of the apparent landing and noticed circular depressions, separated by a crown, on the ground. The next day, after noticing how upset he was during the night, his wife called the gendarmerie, which came to his home and found two concentric circles on the ground, one 2.2 meters (7.2 feet) in diameter and the other 2.4 meters (7.8 feet) in diameter, with a raised area between them 10 centimeters (about 4 inches) wide. They gathered soil samples of the traces and control samples from outside the area.

The GEPAN investigators went to the site in Trans-en-Provence a month later, collected additional samples of the compacted soil and nearby plants, gathered control samples, and reinterviewed Mr. Nicolai. The physical traces left by “the object” provided the laboratories with much useful information on its nature, its shape, and its mechanical characteristics.

The biochemical analyses carried out on wild alfalfa from the site revealed a major deterioration of the vegetation, apparently caused by powerful electromagnetic fields. Dr. Michel Bounias, from the National Institute of Agronomic Research, showed that the plant degradation was probably due to pulsated microwaves. The following year, new measurements taken on the alfalfa showed a return to normal biological activity.

Drawing by witness Renato Nicolai of the Trans-en-Provence object, which left visible ground traces and caused nearby plants to degrade
. © temoin, GEIPAN

The GEPAN investigation went on for a full two years and came to some very interesting conclusions. There was evidence of a strong mechanical pressure, probably due to a heavy weight, on the ground surface, and simultaneously or immediately, the soil was heated to between 300 and 600 degrees C. In the immediate vicinity of these ground traces, the chlorophyll content of the wild alfalfa leaves was reduced 30 to 50 percent, inversely proportional to its distance from the landing site. The younger alfalfa leaves experienced the highest loss of chlorophyll, and moreover exhibited “signs of premature senescence.” By way of comparison, biochemical analysis showed numerous differences between vegetation samples obtained close to the site and those more distant.

The report concluded that “it was possible to qualitatively show the occurrence of an important event which brought with it deformations of the terrain caused by mass, mechanics, a heating effect, and perhaps certain transformations and deposits of trace minerals.” Nuclear irradiation does not seem to account for the observed effects, but some type of electrical energy field might account for the chlorophyll reductions.
⁵

Roughly one year after the case of Trans-en-Provence, the so-called Amaranth case of 1982 involved the daytime sighting by a scientist (M.H., a cellular biologist) of a smallish object about one meter in diameter hovering above his garden. The witness first saw the shiny flying craft at 12:35 p.m. in front of his house, making a slow descent. He stepped back as it seemed to move toward him, until it stopped about one meter above the ground and sat there, silently hovering for about twenty minutes, which he measured by looking at his watch. He was not frightened, and, being a scientist, made a detailed, precise observation. He described it as oval and resembling two coupled metal saucers, one on top of the other, the upper half a blue-green dome. It suddenly shot straight up, as if pulled by strong suction, and the grass underneath momentarily stood straight up, but it left no visible traces on the ground.

The gendarmerie made extensive notes on the event within five hours and reported their findings to GEPAN, which sent a team of investigators forty-eight hours later. Of high interest were the visible traces left on nearby vegetation, particularly on an amaranth bush, whose leaves were desiccated and dehydrated after the event. The fruits of other plants around where the object had hovered looked as if they had been cooked. Biochemical analyses showed that these effects could only have been caused by a strong heat flux, most likely due to powerful electromagnetic fields, causing dehydration. This electric field would have had to exceed 200 kV/m at the level of the plant, which could also have caused the blades of grass to lift up. Subsequent investigations showed that this phenomenon could be reproduced in the laboratory by using very intense electric fields.

The “Amaranth case” involved an object, drawn by the witness, that hovered near the ground. Vegetation was desiccated, most likely by powerful electromagnetic fields
. © temoin, GEIPAN

A psychologist in charge of analyzing the testimony and the psychological profile of the witness concluded in his report that this story had not been invented and that the witness was neither a mythomaniac nor a hoaxer.

Such field investigations demonstrated the possibility of the physical reality of the UAP, but, in fact, the aeronautical cases are the ones which provide the most convincing results on this question. Unlike land witnesses, pilots are operating within the framework of a transportation or air security mission, following the directives coming from civilian or military navigation control centers. They are neutral and highly trained observers when sightings of UAP occur. Such observations of strange unidentified air phenomena by civilian and military pilots in France led to the creation of a database of 150 cases of aeronautical UAP beginning in 1951. The classification into the four categories showed that over 10 percent (fifteen) of the aeronautical UAP cases belong to Type D, the ones that can’t be explained despite precise witness accounts and good-quality evidence. In about half these cases, environmental effects such as electromagnetic interference with on-board instruments and/or disturbances of the radio connection with air traffic controllers were reported by the pilots when UAP were nearby.

In January 1994, SEPRA investigated a case that turned out to be the most exceptional pilot case documented in the French skies. On January 28, Captain Jean-Charles Duboc and copilot Valerie Chauffour were piloting Air France flight 3532, making the Nice-London connection at a speed of 350 knots (approximately 650 kilometers/hour) in the early afternoon. The visibility was excellent when a crew member informed the captain and his copilot about a dark object to the left of the aircraft, which he thought was a weather balloon. It was 13:14 GMT and the sun was at the zenith. At first, Duboc thought it was an aircraft banking at a 45-degree angle, but soon all three agreed that this was not a familiar object. They estimated a distance of twenty-two miles (fifty kilometers) at an altitude of six miles (ten kilometers). At first it looked bell-shaped, and then more like a lens or disc, brown and large, and the witnesses were struck by its changes in shape. After about a minute, it disappeared almost instantaneously, as if suddenly becoming invisible, without any escape trajectory. The duration of this sighting was approximately a minute.

Captain Duboc reported the incident to authorities at the Reims air navigation control center, which had no information about any aircraft in the location. A report was then sent to SEPRA, which classified it as Type C, meaning it was insufficiently documented for identification. However, Reims contacted the Taverny air defense operations center, CODA, and we later learned something important that allowed us to reclassify this event as a clear Type D: CODA recorded a radar track at their control center in Cinq-Mars-la-Pile that corresponded in both location and time to the observation of the crew of Air France flight 3532. The object disappeared from view of the radar scope and the crew
at the same instant
. CODA’s investigations ruled out the possibility of a weather balloon. Because the precise crossing distance of the two trajectories was known, experts estimated that the UAP was about 750 feet long.