Posted on 04/18/2003 11:44:07 PM PDT by green team 1999
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."
for information and discusion only,not for profit etc,etc.
I am unaware of this. Seems dubious.
There is an argument--along the lines of the Fermi Paradox. It goes like this:
The Sun is a 3rd-generation star. If there are lots of intelligent ETs, they've been around for thousands or millions of years, and their technology would appear godlike to us. Even at 5% of the speed of light, there has been ample time for every star to be visited.
One strategy would be to build 'von Neumann' robots. Programmed to select a star at random, gather all data, and build a copy of themselves from local materials. Dump the entire database into the copy; then both vehicles randomly go to two more stars. You get an exponential explosion of probes, each knowing everything its ancestors did. The payoff: every once in a while, one of the probes wanders home and dumps its data. A huge payoff for a modest investment.
The problem is that there ought to be a traffic jam of probes right here, right now. We do not observe them. Hence either there are no intelligent ETs or the difficulty of achieving even 5% of "c" are insurmountable.
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Incidentally, the book "Rare Earth" makes distressingly-persuasive arguments which lead to the conclusion that we are the only intelligent species in the Universe--or maybe only the Milky Way Galaxy. Recommended reading.
--Boris
I used to, but then I read "Rare Earth".
I fear we may be the only intelligent species in the galaxy. Perhaps each galaxy has one or two.
This saddens me greatly, since I have spent my life trying to help humans reach space--and ultimately (in a few hundred or thousand years?) the stars.
Being "alone" bothers me a lot. It imparts a terrible portent to everything you do--down to bodily functions. Also if the human race is the best the Universe can produce, it's a pretty sorry place.
The more I learn about the problems of living in space--and the near-impossibility of attaining even a fraction of the speed of light, the more depressed I get. If humanity is "stuck" on Earth, it is doomed. Either by the proverbial giant asteroid, or some other disaster (such as, say, a "super SARS" that kills 100% and spreads like wildfire).
Think about this: we may be living at (or near) the peak of human achievement, well-being, and knowledge...everything goes downhill from here. There are six billion humans on Earth; the planet can probably support 20 billion but eventually (and soon) the sheer numbers of people will cause some kind of disaster(s).
I'm glad I have no children.
--Boris
That's extremely interesting, may I ask in what capacity you were involved?
I happen to believe that the future of humanity has to lie in space exploration. I argue this with one of my friends, his position is that the money spent on NASA ought to be used here on earth, for social engineering, developing a new energy source for cars or whatever. My answer is that while the short term benefits of spending the funds like that may seem to be greater, the long term benefits of space exploration are everything, they are our future.
I think your pessimism regarding life elsewhere could be overstated, it seems to me that, good as the arguements against it may seem, they may well presume an understanding of the universe that we have not yet attained. Kind of like trying to determine the existence of God through logic, perhaps it can't be done.
OTOH, sometimes I personally feel like humanity is doomed to be a failed species.
I also have a fear that discovery of an alien life form could be an unpleasant surprise, particularly if they are not only more technologically advanced than us, but also advanced greatly in intelligence.
My boss thinks so.
--Boris
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