official mission with specific responsibilities, I had imposed on myself, as was my duty, great reserve in expressing any interpretations or conclusions on the UFO question. Now, all of that has changed. After these many decades of acquired knowledge and experience, I am no longer restricted and can express my personal conclusions with complete freedom of conscience. Therefore, I have chosen to speak here more freely and with more openness than in my previous publications.
First, it is possible to show, using data from established cases officially listed throughout the world, that UFOs—material objects—exist and are distinct from any ordinary phenomena. These cases are few, but their extraordinary characteristics and physical effects demonstrate this fact without ambiguity. On the basis of well- established cases, the existence of UFOs is without question.
UFOs seem to be “artificial and controlled objects,” and their physical characteristics can be measured by our detection systems—particularly radar. They display a physics seemingly far different from that which we employ in our most technologically advanced countries. Ground and on-board radar show that their performances greatly exceed our best aeronautical and space capabilities. These capabilities include stationary and silent flights, accelerations and speeds defying the laws of inertia, effects on electronic navigation or transmission systems, and the apparent ability to induce electrical blackouts. When encountered by military aircraft, these objects seem able to anticipate and neutralize pilots’ defensive maneuvers, as in such remarkable cases as that of General Parviz Jafari over Tehran and the incidents at Malmstrom Air Force Base.[86] In such encounters, the UFO phenomenon appears to behave as if it is under some kind of intelligent control.
My relationship to this subject matter began in 1977, when I was working as an engineer at CNES, the French space agency. That year, CNES was put in charge of launching an official investigation into the UFO phenomenon in France, under the auspices of a new internal agency then called GEPAN.[87] I soon learned why CNES set up this department—France had been dealing with the question of unidentified aerospace phenomena for more than twenty-five years.
It began in 1951, when three Air Force pilots flying separate Vampire F-5B fighters encountered a shiny, silvery round object. Two tried to close in on it, but it was much faster than they were. A UFO wave followed in 1954, in which gendarmes throughout metropolitan France collected over 100 official reports of “flying saucers,” some of which were classified as “close encounters.” In one instance, observed by several thousand people, something strange flew back and forth over Tananarive, which today is Antananarivo, the capital of the island of Madagascar. The witnesses were shopping at the outdoor market in the early evening, and were frozen in place and flabbergasted by what they saw. They described a kind of green ball the size of an airplane, followed by a metallic object shaped like a rugby ball. Dogs were running and howling throughout the city and oxen panicked and destroyed the fences of their enclosures. Most extraordinary was the fact that, during the flight over the capital by this phenomenon, the public power system went off and came back on a few minutes later, after the departure of the “large green ball” and its apparent companion. As might be expected, there was a public outcry and much coverage in the press, all of which prompted an investigation by the French government authorities.
Twenty years later, in 1974, the Defense Minister, Robert Galley, declared on national radio that there existed an unexplained phenomenon that needed to be studied. At the time, I had no idea I would become so involved with this investigation. Our first task at GEPAN, I realized, was to establish a network of police, gendarmerie, Air Force, Navy, meteorologists, and aviation officials and a methodology so that data from sightings could be reported and centralized. A scientific council comprised of astronomers, physicists, legal experts, and other eminent citizens met annually to evaluate and direct studies.
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[88] 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
