by Leslie Kean
CHAPTER 12
Taking the Phenomenon Seriously
In order to evaluate the U.S. government’s actions and put them in perspective, we can learn a great deal from examining the activities of other governments and their handling of military and aviation UFO encounters. Since the close of Project Blue Book, the United States has become somewhat of a pariah on the international scene when it comes to official UFO investigations, which is especially a problem since as a superpower it has unique potential to influence scientific progress on issues of global significance. Other nations have behaved admirably when UFO events occurred within their airspace. Some have collected useful data when anomalous objects appeared on radar or left marks on the ground, as has happened in France and the UK. These two countries were especially well equipped to handle events as remarkable as a UFO touching down, because they had in place government agencies specifically tasked with taking UFO reports and conducting investigations. Even after the United States bowed out of the UFO business in 1970, other countries kept at it, and still others formed new investigative offices later on, approaching the problem straightforwardly and responsibly.
During the years following the United States’ shutdown of its only public UFO agency, those moving forward elsewhere have done the best they could, while sometimes struggling for funding and resources. Thankfully, they have not modeled themselves after Project Blue Book. Rather than devote themselves to disseminating false explanations and other propaganda, these agencies have been willing to conduct honest investigations and acknowledge, particularly in cases documented by pilots, the presence of something unidentified that could not be explained. Pilots and air crews in other nations are not pressured to keep quiet, as their American counterparts were during the O’Hare incident, and are not nearly as wary of ridicule as are their American peers. Elsewhere, military and commercial pilots go on the record about their encounters, and press conferences are held to release information. Aviation safety issues are addressed in connection with UFO events. In general, although the U.S. government hasn’t budged since 1970, much of the rest of the world has been moving increasingly in the direction of taking UFOs more seriously.
The UK’s study of UFOs began in 1950 within the Ministry of Defence, making it one of the longest running official programs in the world. The MoD had a designated agency, or “UFO desk,” that handled UFO reports and investigated cases. In December 2009, the staff became so overwhelmed by the volume of UFO reports from the public, which were at a ten-year high, and the endless stream of FOIA requests about the subject that it closed down its public reporting program. The MoD had not found a way to solve these cases, which, it stated, did not represent a national security threat. It did acknowledge, however, the obvious: that any “legitimate threats”—cases involving military pilots, air defense installations, or objects tracked on radar—would still be dealt with accordingly.1 The UK had also already begun the lengthy process of releasing all the files accumulated during the years the UFO desk was in operation.
In South America, Chile and Peru set up new government agencies tasked with studying UFO cases in 1997 and 2001, respectively. The Brazilian military has conducted UFO investigations since the late 1940s. Russian cosmonauts, scientists, and high-ranking military officials have spoken publicly about UFO events there. And for the first time, the Mexican Defense Department provided data on an unsolved sighting by an Air Force crew to a civilian researcher in 2004, an important step in government openness within that country.
The French government is generally recognized for maintaining the most productive, scientific, and systematic government investigation of UFOs in the world, continuing without interruption for over thirty years. The agency, now called GEIPAN2 (Group for the Study and Information on Unidentified Aerospace Phenomena), is part of the French national space agency known as CNES,3 the French equivalent of our NASA, and serves as a model for other nations that have consulted with it over the years. Particularly remarkable is the network of scientists, police officials, and other specialists that are linked to GEIPAN, ready at a moment’s notice to assist with the investigation of any UFO case. Its purpose has always been purely as a research agency, not primarily concerned with defense issues as was the MoD in England or with aviation safety like Chile. It was set up seven years after the close of Project Blue Book, and states its mission as simply to investigate “unidentified aerospace phenomena” and make its findings available to the public.
Jean-Jacques Velasco of France, Nick Pope of the UK, and General Ricardo Bermúdez of Chile have all headed small government agencies within their own countries that worked full-time on investigating UFO cases. They, among others writing in the pages that follow, describe their innovative work on behalf of their governments, and the impact such close-up work with the UFO phenomenon has had on their lives. In countries around the world, witnesses and investigators such as these are very aware of the need for greater participation by the United States, and are now coming together to address that problem.
Whether they have set up specific offices for UFO investigation or not, many governments have accumulated massive amounts of UFO case documentation over the decades and the public has placed great emphasis on gaining the release of these official files.
In recent years, as if part of a trend toward greater transparency, unprecedented numbers of these documents have been declassified and made public for the first time. Since 2004, the governments of Brazil, Chile, France, Mexico, Russia, Uruguay, Peru, Ireland, Australia, Canada, and the United Kingdom have released once-secret files, and in 2009 even Denmark and Sweden joined the trend by releasing over 15,000 files each. However, none of these new records have changed our overall understanding of the phenomenon, beyond confirming that the same events occur around the world and that the behavior of the objects, and often of the governments responding to them, has been repeated over and over. Unfortunately, there has been little forward motion in terms of actually solving the mystery, and the acquisition of even more documents is not the answer.
In fact, government investigators have by and large been limited by the fact that all they’ve been able to do so far is learn as much as possible after a single event is over. Without greater resources, not much can be done except for the filing of reports, year after year. Letters from civilians about isolated, often questionable sightings are also added to the aggregate, making up a large proportion of the released pages. Although often fascinating, government documents no longer reveal anything new, and the thousands and thousands of pages have not led to a major breakthrough in understanding. The most sensitive files—the intelligence reports that are concerned with more serious national security implications and likely deeper investigations and analysis—will not be declassified and released. No long-awaited “smoking gun” document has surfaced.
I believe that a demand for the release of yet more files—even in the United States—is no longer a useful focus. It’s an interesting sidetrack, but it does not speak to the heart of the problem. Undue emphasis on seeking further release of documents could even prolong the international stalemate we now face, and give governments a way out through claims that they have done their part by declassifying files or will be doing so in the near future.
Yet the public continues to get very excited about seeing new batches of government documents about UFOs. Most recently, the release of large archives by France in 2007 and the UK in 2008, 2009, and 2010 generated a frenzy of international media coverage in America. So many people logged on to the French website its first day that it crashed. Most interesting was the announcement that about 28 percent of the French cases remain unexplained—approximately the same percentage found by Project Blue Book and the Condon report in 1968.4
A featured 2008 piece in the New York Times by a staff reporter stationed in the UK selectively focused on a few of the silliest new documents released by the British MoD (letters written to the agency by wacky everyday people), and provided readers
with the standard ridicule and blatantly biased approach traditionally employed by that noted paper.5 Ironically, this led to the media breakthrough I had been waiting for: The New York Times published the first serious op-ed piece about UFOs in the paper’s history. “Unidentified Flying Threats” by former UK Ministry of Defence official Nick Pope6 offered a rational response to that initial, essentially dishonest story. But once again, none of this publicity changed the political landscape in America regarding UFOs, or did much of anything really, except to make the point that UFOs must be taken seriously.
Unfortunately, we have no way of knowing whether more revealing documents remain closeted away by some governments in secure locations. We know even less about what remains classified in the United States, the most important one of all, and it’s highly unlikely that these documents will be provided anytime soon. If a government agency does not wish to release certain sensitive material through the Freedom of Information Act, it won’t. So in seeking a new emphasis while attempting to inform and persuade American officials to reevaluate the UFO issue, we can begin by learning from the other countries with established government agencies of their own, and finding out what has been gained from these endeavors. How were these agencies set up, and why? How does their work contrast with that of Project Blue Book? What have they learned about UFOs? What actions have they taken as a result?
First and foremost, we turn to France. Exclusive pieces by General Denis Letty, chair of the COMETA group, and Jean-Jacques Velasco, head of the French government agency for over twenty years, explore these questions. Another noted expert from France, Yves Sillard, is one of the most prominent proponents of cooperative international UFO research in the world. Former director general of the French national space center, CNES, Sillard is currently chairman of the steering committee for GEIPAN. In 1977, while head of CNES, he founded the original French scientific committee charged with the investigation of UFO reports—GEPAN, then with a different name. Sillard has served in many important government and research positions between then and his recent return to GEIPAN. In 1998, NATO appointed him assistant secretary general for scientific and environmental affairs.
In the United States, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) is considered in the popular mind to be the country’s premier scientific organization with the most knowledge about everything that happens in outer space—a global leader in Earth and space research. CNES has a mandate and an esteem in France that parallel those of NASA here. Responsible for shaping and implementing France’s space policy in Europe, CNES, although smaller than NASA, also works on developing space systems and new technologies in cooperation with the European Space Agency, headquartered in Paris. Obviously, the views of the successive directors of either organization—CNES or NASA—are of great significance, whether they deal with the complexities of space exploration or the perplexities of the UFO phenomenon.
Yves Sillard, unknown to most Americans, is a man of stature within the European space community. He founded what has become the world’s most effective agency investigating UFOs more than thirty years ago, and still plays a leading role in directing that agency today.
Most important, he has successfully bridged what is usually a gap between scientific space research and UFO investigations, thereby assuring their coexistence within the framework of the French government’s national space agency. In 2007, Sillard consolidated his ideas in the landmark book Phénomènes aérospatiaux non identifiés7: Un défi à la science (Unidentified Aerial Phenomena: A Challenge to Science), written under his direction in collaboration with other scientists. A year later, in 2008, I had the privilege of meeting with him at CNES headquarters in Paris.
Mr. Sillard has provided the following commentary, composed specifically for this volume, summing up the current situation. We must all recognize the power carried by these concise, pointed words, which are highly unusual given the stature of Mr. Sillard in the world community.
The objective reality of unidentified aerial phenomena, better known to the general public as UFOs, is no longer in doubt. The data recorded by GEIPAN are based on rigorous methods of analysis and control. The aeronautical cases come from competent witnesses, trained to cope with unexpected situations and react calmly.
The climate of suspicion and disinformation, not to mention derision, which still too often surrounds the collection of reports, illustrates a surprising form of intellectual blindness. This is obviously the reason for the silence of many witnesses who do not dare to come forward, and is particularly true for pilots, civilian or military, who fear jeopardizing their careers by speaking out. We must be very open with information, in order to minimize the drama and make it easier for witnesses to file reports.
In addressing UFOs, we must consider the future. One day, through the conquest of space, we will be able to journey outside our solar system, something that is conceivable to us now, through simple extrapolation of our existing technical capacities. For the first time, this potential opens the door to a credible vision of contact between faraway civilizations, considered in the past to be unthinkable.
In spite of some spectacular progress in recent years, today’s science will appear very humble when looking back a few centuries from now. The development of science even in the next decades will certainly lead to many new concepts, totally unforeseeable today. What appear to be insurmountable obstacles to more advanced civilizations traveling from exoplanets to Earth will probably appear in a very different light then, and completely new hypotheses, linked to still unborn cosmological theories, will likely have been proposed and realized, completely changing how we view the physical world and the surrounding universe.
Even now—though so far the idea is only hypothetical—what if some unidentified phenomena are discovered to be automatic or inhabited vehicles coming from exoplanets? Shouldn’t the famous “precautionary principle” inspire political leaders to at least think about the consequences for every aspect of our society if this hypothesis were to be confirmed? The European Environmental Bureau position is that “the precautionary principle justifies early action in the case of uncertainty and ignorance in order to prevent potential harm.” It defines “uncertainty” as “a framework of understanding where we know enough to identify what we don’t know.”8 The authors of the COMETA Report initiated the process of offering some commonsense recommendations to the highest civilian and military authorities, in order to prepare them to react in the most appropriate way in case what is today only a hypothesis should tomorrow become a reality. I would recommend greater responsiveness from authorities around the world.
As long as no other credible interpretation has been formulated, let us simply hope that GEIPAN and other agencies can make a modest contribution to this debate and that they will stimulate thinking about these phenomena, the existence of which cannot be contested. And finally, let us hope that our joint efforts will inspire unprejudiced minds to consider the extraterrestrial hypothesis with the seriousness and rigor it deserves, as long as no other credible interpretation has been formulated.
CHAPTER 13
The Birth of COMETA
by Major General Denis Letty (Ret.)
To learn more about the open approach of the French military to the problem of UFOs, Major General Denis Letty has provided us with his personal perspective on the historic COMETA Report, explaining why he felt personally compelled to organize the group’s investigation. As I mentioned previously, it was the work of a group of retired French generals and other officials from that country, coming together to write this report, that first brought the UFO issue to my attention. General Letty was the initiator of that effort, a central, driving force behind its completion. In the report, he and the other authors took the American government to task for its denials of the existence of UFOs, its harsh treatment of witnesses, and its excessive secrecy and spreading of “disinformation.” They asked the U.S. government to join France and other countries in a cooperative ven
ture to investigate the UFO phenomenon, perhaps under the auspices of the European Union. No response has been forthcoming.
Denis Letty, chairman of the COMETA group, is a well-known former fighter pilot who was head of the French Air Defense, southeast zone, and the French military mission for the Allied Air Force of Central Europe. A Fifth Wing commander, he also served as Strasbourg air base commander. In 2008, I was privileged to sit down with General Letty at his home on the outskirts of Paris. He and his wife were extremely gracious to filmmaker James Fox and me, who, complete with files, notepads, and a film crew to document our discussions, descended upon their well-kept, hillside duplex apartment with a stunning view of the city. Meeting him was a milestone for me personally. Dignified, gracious, and personable, General Letty was candid and relaxed with us, yet carried tremendous authority. He’s still mystified about the UFO phenomenon and wants very much to see a resolution.
As we sat around a table in his living room discussing French cases with the cameras running, Letty addressed the issue of government transparency on UFOs. “I don’t think a powerful country like America finds it acceptable to acknowledge that something strange can fly over and the country can’t clear the skies of it. Another problem can be panic, created by people imagining that their military can’t protect them.” I carefully noted his further comments about the U.S. government role: “We are convinced that some governments don’t say all they know about the subject, and I mean, of course, the States. That’s why we asked for good cooperation from all countries. We’re ready to do the research, to work together.”1 The general is convinced that nothing remains hidden within the French military about UFOs, since all the files were released the previous year in order to make that very point. General Letty recently expanded his thoughts for us here.
