Re: Do aliens really exist?//Sage says emphatically YES!

Reply to article by: Sir Arthur C. B. E. Wholeflaffers A.S.A. <nospam@newsranger.com>
Date written: Tue, 16 Sep 2003 16:38:09 GMT
MsgID:<R%G9b.20464$cJ5.2878@www.newsranger.com>

Do aliens really exist? Just ask France's official UFO hunters By Adam Sage

Flying saucers and alien spacecraft have long been favourites of film and TV
producers, but Jean-Jacques Velasco believes that not all UFO sightings can be
dismissed as products of over- active imaginations


Yet another belief.

On a cold Monday morning 22 years ago, Jean-Jacques Velasco was sitting in his
office when a gendarme rang to tell him about a strange incident. Renato
Nicolai, a retired technician, had been working in his garden in
Trans-en-Provence, near Nice, when he saw a dark, round object come down from
the sky, settle on the ground and take off again, the gendarme said. Over the
years, Velasco has heard many such stories, and disproved most of them.  But
this one was different - this one was credible, he believes.  Something seems to
have landed in Trans-en-Provence, he says, and that something has never been
identified.


Renato's story has never been validated as having actually taken place,
therefore there is nothing to identify outside of his imagination.

But who is Velasco? Another crackpot determined to find a flying saucer? No, he
is a scientist working for the state-run National French Centre for Space
Studies (CNES), where he heads a department responsible for analysing what are
commonly called unidentified flying objects (UFOs) but what are officially known
as unidentified aerospace phenomena (UAP).

A neatly-dressed, bespectacled man, Velasco talks with the careful precision of
an academic who is keen to be understood.  He is not saying that he has come
across visitors from another planet; he is saying merely that events occur for
which science has yet to find an explanation, and which merit further inquiry.


He is merely saying that events take place, not proving that any events took
place. You have to prove the event took place before you can draw any
conclusions.

Velasco�s department was set up in 1977, the year that Close Encounters of the
Third

Kind was released amid a global UFO fever. Across the world people thought they
saw strange figures, flying saucers and bright lights.


Everytime a new movie comes out like that, the same thing happens: religious UFO
fervor.

But there were few serious attempts to probe the issue. The CNES set up the
Service for Expert Appraisal of Atmospheric Re-entry Phenomena (SEPRA). Based in
Toulouse, the department is as pedantic as its title sounds: the staff are
state-employed scientists, shaped by a prudent, rigorous and somewhat
bureaucratic culture. In France such bureaucracy can often be cumbersome and
painfully rigid. Yet in this domain at least, this rigidity offers a guarantee
of impartiality that is rare as far as UFOs are concerned.
Last year, when the CNES was told to reduce its 1.3 billion budget, the
organisation�s president, Alain Bensoussan, ordered an audit into SEPRA�s work.
A wide range of French scientists was asked whether it was worth continuing
research; almost all said yes.
One reason is because, unlike most other UFO-hunters, SEPRA�s staff are neither
seeking publicity nor peddling an obscure belief in extraterrestrial
civilisation. They say they do not know whether extraterrestrial beings exist or
not, and look disparaging when you ask them to voice their hunches on the
question.


That proves nothing except the French government like UFOs.

They do not have hunches, only statistics. Yet the statistics that Velasco has
made public are eloquent. Since, 1977, SEPRA has received some 6,000 reports of
alleged UFO sightings. Of these, 110 are from civil or military aircraft crew,
and the rest from ordinary French people who have almost invariably contacted
their local gendarmerie.

In 21.3% of cases there is a clear, indisputable and banal explanation: a
firework display, a novel lighting system involving a luminous balloon, a cloud
above the Pyrenees that is shaped like a flying saucer. In 24.9% there is a
probable explanation, and in 41.3% the information is too vague to be of use.
But in 12.5 per cent of cases about 750 sightings since 1977 the evidence is
detailed and inexplicable, and is thus categorised as an unidentified
phenomenon.


But just because they couldn't identify it, doesn't mean with enough additional
information that they could never be identified...presuming that any of the
reports of the events actually took place as claimed.

Most alleged UFOs are spotted by the sober and sensible, says Velasco. "In all
our statistics on the people who see these phenomena only one in 1,000 is not
credible because of alcohol.  People go to gendarmerie spontaneously; mainly
because they want to know what they have seen."


Not surprizing seeing as most religious fanatics won't touch alcohol.

Yet a witness�s good faith is not enough, and the story must be corroborated.
Consider, for instance, a case reported in 1994, when the crew of an Air France
flight from Nice to London saw a dark, 300-metre long object over the Paris
region. The object disappeared before the aircraft had got near it, and the
flight continued without difficulty. A few days later Velasco travelled from his
office in Toulouse to the military aviation control centre outside Paris, where
he was given a read-out of the radar information from the day in question. It
revealed that an unknown object had indeed flown over the French capital.
Consider, too, the Trans-en- Provence case. Velasco went through the usual
checks with the gendarme. Was there evidence? The apparent answer was yes, as
there were marks in the grass where the object had supposedly landed.

Velasco drove to Trans-en-Provence and took ground samples.  These showed that
the area had been heated to between 300�C and 600�C, that it had been compressed
by something weighing up to a tonne and that the plants there had been affected
by a strong electromagnetic field. Velasco concluded that Nicolai had indeed
witnessed a strange happening. So should we conclude that little green men were
taking a look at Provence from their spaceship?  Velasco dismisses such ideas.
"We cannot say whether there is a link between the question of extraterrestrial
life and that of non-identified aerospace phenomena," he says. "But we can show
that UFOs exist. The problem is interpreting them, and I hope that scientists,
and other people, look at this question more seriously."


These are wonderful stories but how do you know they are anything more than
stories?

The Sage

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"The men that American people admire most extravagantly are
most daring liars; the men they detest the most violently are
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