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.
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.[89]
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.
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
In studying aviation cases, an important contribution was made by an outstanding independent French investigator,[90] Dominique Weinstein, who has catalogued 1,305 cases of UAP and UFO sightings by pilots—cases for which adequate data is available to categorize the UAP as unknowns— collected from official sources, including material I provided from CNES/SEPRA. The following results are interesting: 606 cases (36.7 percent) are sightings by military pilots and crews; 444 cases (26.9 percent) are sightings by civilian pilots; and 196 cases (11.8 percent) are by private pilots. In 200 cases (12.1 percent) the visual observation was confirmed by on-board or ground radar. And in 57 cases (3.45 percent), the pilots noted electromagnetic effects and disturbances on one or more of the plane’s transmission systems.
In combination with radar, we can draw a clear picture of the physicality of the UFO maneuvers in the airspace. The analysis of certain characteristics and maneuvers of these objects indicates behaviors that have nothing to do with any natural phenomena or with operations carried out by aircrafts or aeronautical and space machines.
One crucial point I have noted, which is shown in Weinstein’s study, is that a UFO’s behavior tends to depend on whether the encounter involves a military aircraft or a civilian passenger plane. Neutrality usually seems the general rule with commercial airlines or private planes, whereas an active interaction often occurs between UFOs and military aircraft. Military pilots usually describe the movements of UFOs as they would air maneuvers of conventional aircraft, using terms such as follows, flees, acute turns, in formation, close collision, and aerial combat. Twenty-two military cases in the Weinstein catalogue involve near misses, and six include reported “dogfights,” or combat maneuvers, between the UFOs and the military aircraft. I conclude that these incidents
