STRANGE EVENTS, STRANGE DEBUNKING IN FRANCE

Unusual UFO events have been reported since August 10 in many parts of
France. Extraordinary sightings of triangular aerial objects in the
Ardenne region near the Belgian border remain unexplained. But another
high-profile case in Voreppe, southeastern France, has turned comedic.

Videotape of a strange-looking object sighted over a tree in a
residential part of Voreppe caused a brief flurry in the French press
and
attracted the involvement of leading French researcher Jean-Jacques
Velasco of CNES/SEPRA. Initially, Velasco hinted that the case might
be
important. But after closer examination of the evidence, he pronounced
the Voreppe UFO a balloon -- not a weather balloon, as initially
thought,
but evidently a large child's balloon shaped like a ladybug.

French researcher Gildas Bourdais said, "This information has been
confirmed to me, convincingly, by Jean-Jacques Velasco. A family of
Voreppe informed the police that their son had dropped a balloon which
was fairly large (nearly one meter) and in the shape of a ladybug.
There
was very little wind, Velasco explained to me, and it drifted, first
losing altitude, hovered for a moment above the garden, and drifted
away.
The night was falling and the witnesses were mistaken about its size.
When they shot the video, the balloon was already at some distance and
hard to identify." Bourdais adds that an independent source familiar
with
the investigation had confirmed the presence of a string hanging down
from the balloon. "The Voreppe case is a good exemple of bad
information
and misunderstandings of all kinds," Bourdais laments.

Did Velasco himself, normally very conservative in his statements,
initially over-react to the Voreppe UFO? Bourdais thinks so. "It is
apparent now that, contrary to his usual approach, Velasco has been a
bit
overexcited on this case, did not look hard enough at the video, and
made
somewhat hasty declarations to the press," he says. Now this might
have a
negative impact on the treatment of other French UFO cases, Bourdais
fears. He points to a very recent case which seems to have been
dismissed
in a bizarre and unconvincing way.

"The popular newspaper 'Le Parisien' revealed that, on Friday evening,
September 18, policemen and gendarmes observed a luminous disc, moving
very slowly above the mouth of the river Seine, between Le Havre and
Honfleur," Bourdais reports. "It was surrounded by three white lights.
The Director of Le Havre harbor (the 'capitainerie') confirmed that
they
had also seen a UFO, which looked to them like a triangle (the three
lights seen from farther away?). However, Velasco told me that, after
calling the witnesses, he realized the whole thing was overblown
again:
they had seen, in fact, the planet Jupiter and its three satellites!"

Bourdais scoffs at this interpretation. "Sounds like the old days of
Blue
Book, doesn't it? To me, it sounds like, if Velasco had been
instructed
to keep the press quiet, he would not act differently," Bourdais
says.

Finally, what do you call a French debunker?  That should be easy >
"an asshole.  Bwa-ha-ha-ha-ha!