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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
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 300ºC and 600ºC, 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."
France's Velasco, CNES & SEPRA
Source: The Belfast Telegraph - Digital
http://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/features/story.jsp?story=378557