Satellite photo of Reunion Island. (image credit: Wikimedia Commons)

Let’s look at an interesting sub-genre of alien occupant, the so-called “Michelin man,” after the logo of the large French tire company Michelin. It’s a cute little man made out of tires of different sizes, which also looks like a spacesuit. (This type of spacesuit was depicted in the late 50s in the hugely popular comic series Tintin, when the hero and his companions go to the Moon.) Yet despite these cultural considerations, the two Close Encounters of the Third Kind (CE-III) with “Michelin men” were real enough, with both physical evidence and physiological effects, which make them Close Encounters of the Second Kind (CE-II) at the same time. Both cases were investigated and documented officially by the French Gendarmerie, a state police which operates throughout France and its overseas territories, and is charged by law to receive UFO reports from the public. They conduct all the interviews with witnesses and any necessary follow-up and then pass on the files to GEIPAN, the French space agency UFO bureau, for statistical analysis or further investigation. These cases, however, occurred before the establishment of GEIPAN (then known as GEPAN) in 1977.

The location of the two incidents was Réunion Island, a remote French outpost in the Indian Ocean. This volcanic island east of Madagascar in Africa is 969 square miles and has 827,000 inhabitants, according to 2009 figures. Annexed by France in the 17^th century, it’s now an overseas department. The first case of farmer Luce Fontaine occurred in the morning of July 31, 1968, while the second incident involving 21-year driver Antoine Séverin took place on February 14, 1975. The remoteness of Réunion Island is an important factor in ruling out sociological contagion, particularly in a period long before the global culture of the internet and satellite cable. Séverin, for instance, had not even heard of Fontaine’s case, which was reported in the press at the time.

A view of the Plaine des Palmistes in Reunion Island. (image credit: Jo Kerozen)

THE FIRST CE-III ON REUNION ISLAND

Cover of the French 1976 edition of Jean-Claude Bourret’s The New UFO Challenge, where the Gendarmerie documents on the 1975 CE-II were published. (image credit: Editions France-Empire)

Although we don’t have the actual police dossier of the first CE-III, we do have a good summary of the case in the massive book by Michel Figuet and J.-L. Ruchon, OVNI: Le premier dossier complet des rencontres rapprochées en France (UFO: The first complete dossier of close encounters in France), published in 1979. We also have the Nov. 1968 article published in the French journal Lumières dans la Nuit (Night Lights, usually referenced as LDLN) translated in England’s Flying Saucer Review ; as well as the beautiful color reproduction of the aliens made long ago by the defunct French UFO group GEOS (see illustration).

At 9 a.m. on July 31, 1968, 22-year-old farmer Luce Fontaine was in a plain called La Plaine des Cafres, specifically at the 21 KM signpost, picking some grass for his rabbits. “I suddenly saw a sort of oval-shaped cabin in the clearing,” Fontaine explained later. “It was 25 meters from me [about 75 feet], and as though suspended at a height of four or five meters [12 to 15 feet] from the ground. The extremities of it were dark blue, the center part lighter, more transparent rather like the windscreen of a [Peugeot] 404. Above and below it had what looked like two glass feet of shining metal.”

The GEOS painting puts the Michelin man outside the saucer, probably to highlight its funny shape since it was part of a set of slides of different types of aliens. But in the real incident at Cafres no such thing occurred. Basically, Fontaine described two humanoids about 90 cm. tall (less than 3 feet) inside the transparent cabin, dressed in the so-called Michelin gear and wearing a shiny metallic helmet covering their face. One of them was standing facing his back to him, but the one on the left turned and faced him. Fontaine’s statement continued:

“Then both turned their backs to me, and there was a flash, as strong as the electric arc of a welding machine. Everything went white around me. A powerful heat was given off and then as it were a sort of blast of wind, and a few seconds later there was nothing there any more.” Fontaine rushed to the site but couldn’t find any noticeable landing traces. He first told his wife, a local teacher, and then reported the encounter to the Gendarmerie. The inquiry was conducted by Captain Maljean of St.-Pierre, and Captain Legros of the Civil Protection Service. Luce Fontaine’s reputation was excellent and so everyone, including the police, believed the story without any doubt. But there was more.

Original reconstruction of the 1968 CE-III done by the French periodical LDNL. (image credit: LDLN)

The GEOS painting showing the 1968 CE-III with “Michelin” aliens in the Plaine des Caffres, Reunion Island. (Image credit: GEOS)

Capt. Legros checked for radioactivity in the landing area ten days later, and found eight radioactive spots on grass and pebbles of up to sixty thousandths of a Roentgen. This count is rather low but it was surmised that it might have been far higher right after the incident, since the checks were done ten days later and there had been heavy rains on the days before. Radioactivity was also found on Fontaine’s clothes, precisely on the side which faced the UFO.

All this led in the following months to a series of bizarre rumors, according to which Fontaine had been flown in secrecy to the Curie Foundation in Paris and was being treated for radiation sickness. All these stories were false, as it often occurs in even good UFO cases. According to Figuet and Ruchon, Fontaine experienced abundant nosebleeds and had to recover at home on the immediate days after the incident, but shortly afterwards he recovered fully. Antoine Séverin, the witness of the second CE-III on Réunion Island wasn’t so lucky. His physiological effects were quite traumatic.

BLINDED & MUTED BY A UFO!

Some of the Gendarmerie UFO dossiers from Bourret’s book. (image credit: J.-C. Bourret)

We do have the complete police dossier on the second CE-III with “Michelin” men in Réunion Island. It runs into dozens of pages of interviews with the witness, his family, neighbors, the doctors who treated him, his boss, etc. The inquiry was conducted by Lt. Col. Lobet of the National Gendarmerie and published by the French journalist J. C. Bourret, together with many other official documents, in his 1976 book, Le nouveau défi des o.v.ni. (The new challenge of UFOs). We also have an excellent summary of the whole case written by Capt. Guillaume Kervendal, the Gendarmerie’s top UFO expert, for the official military journal Armées d’aujourd’hui (Armies of Today) in September 1975, just a few months after the incident itself.

While little known, this case should be a classic of that very uncomfortable but at the same time convincing category of UFO incident: the physiological injury cases, which have been documented by John Schuessler, Bob Pratt and others. It also has some unusual aspects like a dream with a sound which preceded the encounter. Let’s quote from Capt. Kervendal’s summary:

“It all started with a dream during the night of February 11 to 12. But was it a dream? Antoine S., a young 21-year-old delivery chauffeur heard or believed to have heard a persistent ‘bip-bip,’ at times near, at times farther. That noise which broke his ears continued until the 14^th, at 12 hours 5 [min.]. After buying some candy, he was walking home. Without a reason, he started running; he stopped, as if impeded by a supernatural force. His eardrums were really bothering him. He left the road and advanced into a corn field. He then felt a strange heat accompanied by a burning sensation. Paralyzed by this force that he couldn’t conquer, he saw an object with aluminum color, stabilized about 1.5 meters [4.5 feet] above the ground, emitting always the lacerating ‘bip-bip.’ A ladder with three steps appeared in the object at a 45 degree inclination. A small occupant with brilliant clothing emerged from the object. He had on his hand some sort of stick. A second character had a satchel plus a third one joined the first as they scraped the soil. They had antennas on both sides of the head. A fourth occupant stayed inside the contraption and it could be seen through the saucer’s translucent dome. The third man suddenly became aware of the presence of young Antoine. A powerful flash came from the object and projected the young man to the ground. He could nevertheless see the beings returning quickly to the craft. The ladder retracted and the UFO rose with a very strong whistling noise. How long did Antoine remain on the ground? He couldn’t say.”

Exact location of the field of the 1975 Séverin case from the Gendarmerie files. (image credit: J.-C. Bourret)

During the next few days, until Feb. 19^th, the witness was in such a state of shock that he was both blinded and mute. He tried to explain what had happened to the gendarmes, gesturing wildly but unable to talk. Everyone in his family, neighbors and his employer vouched that he was a reliable and responsible individual. No solid landing traces or radioactivity were found on the site, but there was still one more troubling detail duly noted in the police reports and in Capt. Kervendal’s summary of the case:

“During the following days, he wanted to return to the site and take the gendarmes. But each time that he penetrated into the corn field, a strange force projected him into the ground and put him again unconscious. In the same manner that when he talked to the gendarmes on Feb. 19 [when he was able to talk again], he didn’t have any recollection of having been in a semi-coma for five days.”

Those are the basic facts of the second and troubling CE-III with “Michelin” men on Réunion Island. The police reports go naturally into much more detail, but at no point there is a suspicion of hoax or mental aberration from the part of the witness. Who were the beings that caused Antoine Séverin such disagreeable symptoms? Although the shape of the “Michelin” aliens may look funny or cute, their behavior and the effects they had on both Luce Fontaine and Antoine Séverin were anything but funny. Another question is why we don’t seem to have any more of this type of report nowadays.

I am afraid I don’t have a good response to any of these questions, but neither did the French Gendarmerie. As put by Capt. Kervendal in his article for the French army review, “the goal of our purpose is not to give here a response to the [UFO] problem. To our knowledge, nobody can, for now, pretend to know it.”

Illustration from a case in Jerez, Spain, where two “Michelin humanoids” were seen by a biker. (image credit: STENDEK)

*          *          *

To find more about these cases on Reunion Island, you can check the excellent French website www.ufologie.net, which has plenty of material in English as well. The 1968 case of Luce Fontaine in the Plaine des Caffres can be found be found here. The 1975 physiological injury case of Antoine Séverin can be found here. This last report includes the translation of the actual Gendarmerie reports written by Lt. Col. Lobet.

If you want to get a feel of what Reunion Island looks like, we recommend you rent the 1969 film Mississippi Mermaid by François Truffaut (the famous French director who played the character of Lacombe in Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind), in which a young and beautiful Catherine Deneuve plays a mail bride that arrives in Reunion Island to marry a tobacco farmer played by Jean-Paul Belmondo. It has nothing to do with UFOs but it’s a great movie filmed on location on this exotic island.

Movie poster of Mississippi Mermaid.

Credit: Sony Pictures

This movie is scheduled to be released next year.

Skyline
With a plot similar to Battle: Los Angeles, Skyline involves strange lights descending on the city of Los Angeles, and an extraterrestrial force threatening to wipe out humanity.

This movie will be released later this year.

Cowboys & Aliens
Based on the graphic novel by Scott Mitchell Rosenberg, Cowboys & Aliens is a movie set in the wild west of the 1800s. Feuding cowboys and Indians are forced to set aside their own conflict to focus on defeating aliens who want to enslave humanity. The film stars Harrison Ford, and will be released next year.

I Am Number Four
Dreamworks, the same company behind Cowboys & Aliens, is releasing I Am Number Four in early 2011. This thriller involves nine aliens fleeing to Earth after their home planet is destroyed by an enemy species. These aliens look just like humans, and attempt to blend in on Earth to avoid their enemy who followed them from their home world.

Michael Bay (seated) with Steven Spielberg

Confidential Alien Project
While this is only the movie’s working title, Confidential Alien Project is Paramount’s current alien project, also being produced by Michael Bay. Little is known about the film at this point, but is apparently deals with alien abduction.

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It is unfortunate to see Hollywood taking such a negative position towards extraterrestrials, portraying them as hostile enemies out to destroy Earth. But audiences largely seem to enjoy invasion flicks, and Hollywood’s objective is to entertain. Hopefully (but unlikely), audiences who watch these UFO movies will become intrigued enough to explore the extraterrestrial/UFO phenomenon for themselves, and make informed decisions on what to believe, based on the wealth of historical and current evidence.

Desmond Leslie and Michael Hesemann in Italy, 1997. (image credit:Paola Harris)

Desmond Leslie

World War II British RAF Spitfire Pilot and aristocrat, Sir Desmond Leslie, co-author of The Flying Saucers Have Landed with famous contactee George Adamski, and German anthropologist Michael Hesemann

The animated conversation that followed came to focus on the possibility that the Nazis actually built disc-shaped flying objects (or flying saucers) in the 1930’s or early 40’s, as many do believe. Here’s the never before released full transcript of the interesting dialogue between Hesemann and Leslie.

Michael Hesemann:  The real German flying saucers program -called V-7 Program – was originally conceived in 1938 by the German engineer Andreas Epp after he saw the first helicopter flying over the fields of the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin, Germany. Andreas Epp developed the project because he was worried about the danger of a collision of the helicopter blades with birds or trees. He therefore designed a jet-propelled aircraft with internal blades, a capsule in the center, and wheels turning around with a crown-shaped dome to protect the wheels.

Epp suggested this project to Ernst Udet, general of the German Aviation Ministry and Udet informed Hermann Göring [Chief of the Luftwaffe, President of the Reichstag, and designated successor to Hitler]. Fascinated by the project, Göring presented it to Adolf Hitler. The “Fuhrer” however did show any interest and refused to finance it, and Göring then decided to take the project under his sole responsibility and the auspice of the Luftwaffe. He called three engineers, who already had military security clearance, Rudolf Schriever, Heinrich  Richard Miethe and Otto Habermohl.

German engineer Andreas Epp in 1997.

For further development they used the Skoda factory in Prag, in the Nazi occupied Bohemia. There they built the craft, and in 1944 the first test flights were conducted.
The problem was that the airplane actually never flew in a satisfactory manner, nor was possible to maneuver and that is why it never entered the production line. Nevertheless, Göring promised Hitler that the project that he led to his attention, was the V-7 weapon, but it never worked.

After World War II, the three engineers were unemployed and had heard about Operation Paperclip [the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) program used to recruit the scientists of Nazi Germany for employment by the United  States] and thought to do a good job with the Americans. At that point, they told the media that a prototype was flying with an acceleration of 1.400 km/h (870 mi): a spectacular performance.

The Americans then became interested and invited Schriever and Miethe – Habermohl had disappeared, maybe captured by the Russians as a POW. The AVRO company financed the project and built the so-called AVRO disc, very similar to the initial design. They obtained the same discouraging results as before, handling problems were insurmountable.  Andreas Epp is still alive [Epp actually died in 1997, shortly after this interview.] I He was an engineer and never was a member of the Nazi Party.

Maurizio Baiata: Is it correct to say that Epp was both, an engineer and a pilot?

German engineer Andreas Epp at work on the model of the Omega Diskus in the 1960's.

M.H.: Yes, but he was never a Nazi and he never had a “political” clearance. That’s why he was never commissioned any project.  He is still looking for sponsors for his idea of a disc shaped aircraft with a jet engine, propellers and internal rotation, but cannot find anyone as the project is not very promising.

M.B.: When did the Americans and Russians discover that the Germans were building and had an arsenal of disc-shaped objects?

Desmond Leslie: I know about a woman who saw the arsenal and took aerial reconnaissance photographs. They analyzed the photos and thought it was a small air base. Churchill spoke about this publicly. After a heated discussion on this, through espionage they later confirmed the installation was there and ordered its elimination. Unfortunately, they missed it by two miles and killed all the poor slaves who worked there.  The Americans flew over it and destroyed a large part of it. In 1943 we knew everything on the subject and we used to call it the “Rocket Run.” Normally, our flight missions were launched every afternoon and we bombed the places where they were building the V-1. The B-25 Mitchell bombers hit the buildings and we were ensuring protection from above.

M.B.: From your aircraft were you able to spot the Nazi installations?

D.L.:  No, we were just escorting the bombers, flew right over and then attack the targets missed by the bombers.

M.B.: They were surface installations?

D.L.: No, they were built in concrete defenses, along the coast of France. Churchill was very concerned that the V-1, able to carry two tons of explosives, could be armed with nuclear bombs. The V-1s hit London for twenty consecutive days. Terrified people were rushing to the shelters every time they heard the noise of the missiles.  
One night I was invited to a very pleasant and elegant dinner at the Grand Duke of Austria mansion. Suddenly the noise came and we dove under the table. Then we heard the crash, we were all terrified, and the Grand Duke rose from the table saying, as a true gentleman: “I must say: if we hear the sound, we are safe.”  Sure the bombs were scary. However, as they go faster than sound, if the first thing you felt was the crash that meant that you survived.

M.B.: I think that the allied secret services would have known that the Germans were building new deadly weapons in secret bases.

D.L.: Well, as you know, we were able to capture a V-1. The French helped us, they arrived in a field and found one that had landed on a wet ground. Despite the conditions we managed to have it take off before the Germans arrived. It was brought to a warehouse in England. The engine was very simple, it looked like an electric fan, it had thousands of small dots in spirals -like a jet- and it was a simple and well made device.

M.H.: Desmond, you are fully aware of the situation. The war was almost at its end and Hitler was desperate and wanted to introduce everything they were building and have it applied as an instrument of war, without even testing it. Half of the V-2 went down and destroyed villages in Germany and killed German citizens. However, he did not wait to solve these errors. He used everything he had, and if he would have had a disc shaped anti-gravity aircraft he would certainly have attacked the British pilots with it. But he did not have it. In the meantime, Foo Fighters [from the French term “feu”, fire, used to describe the mysterious lights appearing in the skies during World War II] were observed by the German and the Allied pilots, but they have never attacked anyone.

M.B.: We know, however, that in the 70’s, a plethora of paper documents on the Nazi flying discs started to appear in the German UFO community.

Desmond Leslie (left) with George Adamski.

M.H.: They came from the Tempelhof Society, which claimed to be descendants of the New Templars, a lodge founded by the Austrian Lanz von Liebenfels in the late 19th century. At the end of the 70’s the Austrian Journal of the Tempelhofgesellschaft published a document which allegedly proved, so to speak, that the George Adamski flying saucer was actually a German construction, called “Haunebu”. 
But what does it mean, “Haunebu”, where does the name come from? In 1953 a German protestant preacher, Jürgen Spanuth, went to Egypt and he visited the Temple of Medinet Habu where he saw the depiction of the Battle against the “Peoples of the Sea”, who came from a country called Haunebu and attacked Egypt. This is a real event that happened at the time of Ramses III.  This people attacked Egypt and later, after being defeated by Ramses III, settled in the area of Gaza and they became the Philistines of the Bible. Their provenance from a Greek island is provable because its’ ceramics is identical to that of Greek and Aegean cultures of that period, the 12th century BC.

Anyway, Spanuth noticed that some of them had helmets with horns on their head like those falsely attributed to the Vikings 2,000 years later. He thought then they could be German tribes of the past. Haunebu actually means “islands in the north (of Egypt)” and is a good description of the Greek islands since they were right north of Egypt. But Spanuth, the deluded German protestant preacher, believed this to be the Egyptian name for the Frisian Islands in the North Sea! He thought that the story told at the walls of the Medinet Habu temple was actually the true story of Atlantis and Atlantis was Helgoland, one of the German islands in the North Sea!

Of course the idea of Spanuth was absurd, but it became popular in Germany. The German right wing, the Neo-Nazis, were fascinated by his theory and considered it an evidence of the superiority of the Teutonic German culture. His book was published by a Neo-Nazi publishing house. But his claim that Haunebu is the Egyptian term for ancient Germany became only popular in the late ‘50s among the right wing neo Nazi activists, not any time before. Indeed Spanuth only visited Egypt and had this idea in the early 1950s, after WW2. Therefore we can be sure that nobody in the Germany of the Third  Reich knew the word Haunebu, nor thought to connect it to the German pre-history. This is why when the Haunebu documents surfaced, we immediately knew they were fakes. No Nazi Engineer of the Third Reich would have had any reason to call a German Nazi weapon project Haunebu, since this term at that time was only known among Egyptologist, meant Greek islands and therefore had no relevance to the Nazis. Only in the late 1950s, in Neo-Nazi circles, it received a new meaning, it suddenly became an Egyptian name for the German “Atlantis”.

Indeed, the “Haunebu-Disc” shown on this faked document is nothing more than the George Adamski saucer, copied from his book “Inside the Spaceship”. And suddenly the Neo-Nazis claimed that Adamski photographed a German flying saucer. Indeed, they blamed Desmond Leslie, as Adamski’s co-author, for launching a disinformation campaign, claiming that “their” German Nazi disc was indeed an extraterrestrial craft. Since Desmond is the grandson of Winston Churchill and George Adamski was a Polish immigrant (some say he was a Jew but I do not think he was) this is in their eyes evidence enough for a conspiracy.

D. L. (joking): Yes, we said that to irritate them.

M. H.: And you think that the SS were kind enough to meet George Adamski and invite him for a ride? Sure, the SS were real nice to everyone, especially to the Polish people! No, honestly, this claim is too ridiculous!

M.B.: Was there any researcher familiar with the SS documents?

M.H.: No, no serious researcher was actually involved.

D.L.: What most irritates me is that at the end it eventually turned out to be a well-made exposure of the five cosmic laws taken from the White Lodge, a very secret association to which I belonged, and they printed them. They were good laws, Law of Peace, Control, Balance et cetera, but they claimed that they were their own laws.

M.H.: I asked a criminologist to check if the typewriter of these documents was a machine of the ‘40s, since that’s the first thing to check: If the only thing you have is a photocopy of a document, you start with the typewriter. The typewriter turned out to be a model called “Gabriele”, built by the German typewriter manufacturer “Triumph Adler”, in ca. 1972 – and the drawing reproduced on the document was actually taken from the book “Space Gravity and the Flying Saucers” written by Leonard Cramp.

D.L.: You are referring to the drawings of the Haunebu.

M.B.: But I’ve seen them, I have seen many drawings of different schemes and projects of the Nazi discs with the SS symbol.

D.L.:  Yes, everyone can find them easily.

M.H.:  Of course, anyone with knowledge of engineering can make a design of any project and can draw one.

D.L.: They were wonderful drawings. My brother was prisoner in a concentration camp. The prisoners were making German stamps from potatoes. You can make a copy of a document from potatoes.  Prisoners who wanted to escape did use these false documents.

M. H.: Anyone can falsify a document.

D.L.: Ohh… that video documentary, had such a stupid narrator’s voice and the music so horrible, it seemed made by space maniacs.

M.B: I know this video, “UFO’s Secret of the Third Reich” as I know very well Gerd Burde, the producer. I met him in Cannes at the 1992 MIP TV market and I wonder if he really knew what he was doing at that time.

Video cover to the documentary "UFO Secrets of the Third Reich".

M.H.: Gerd Burde is one of the most deluded persons I have ever known. He claimed to be an alien from the constellation of Antares and now says he is the reincarnated prophet Eliah and he organizes workshops for a mere $2000 for a two days admission. He has published a series of books where he claims to be the Prophet Eliah and a series of videos about Atlantis.

D.L.: I’d call him a liar.

M.H.: His behavior is intentional.

D.L.: There are so many people like him in America.

M.B.: I think he is one of a kind and a type of person that surely you do not find in the United States.

M.H.: He moved to Tasmania and I know he is there now.

D.L.: I sincerely hope he stays there forever.

M.B.: Let’s talk about the video and its contents.

D.L.: False.

M.H.: The photos of the Nazi discs are a ridiculous hoax, because the object is blurred when the clouds in the background are in focus – it must be a model close to the camera. I did not know the concept of the documentary, I never said that the Haunebu were real: I only talked with Burde about the V-7 project and that this happened. I still do not know who put the photos in that film.

M.B.: Desmond, what is your opinion about this video?

D.L.: It’s a fake: They took the George Adamski’s flying saucer and they attributed it to the Germans and created a video with bad ear piercing music, and a disgusting narration.

M.H.: It’s a Nazi propaganda film.

D.L.: Yes, but a very bad propaganda and half of the book is anti-Semitic propaganda. It is all about the Rothschild-Jewish world conspiracy?

M.H.: They thought that the God of Israel was a negative extraterrestrial who took the Jews as leaders to take control of the planet. And Adolf Hitler was the messiah who would rid the world of the Jewish conspiracy. The book is written by a young fanatic, calling himself Jan van Helsing, certainly it was inspired by the story of Dracula. The book was banned by the German government because it contained anti-Semitic and Nazi propaganda, both prohibited in our country.

D.L.: Was this part of a secret government strategy? And why they did not have it work better? I really think it was an international conspiracy.

M.H.: Maybe.

D.L.: Their mission is to continuously ignite new wars.

M.H.:
 Obviously…

D.L.: For example, the Vietnam War was one of the weakest wars, organized just to test on new weapons.

M.B.: I once asked Colonel Corso [who was traveling with us but in a different car] to give me his insight, since he was in the US Military Intelligence long enough. How could the US allow the Vietnam War to escalate, once they knew how difficult the Korean War had been and how insidious the Far East scenario was. It was clear that the escalation would lead to a complete downfall and to thousands and thousands of US casualties. Corso replied: “I remember one day, I participated in a meeting at the Pentagon in Washington with General Troudeau. The point you are making was discussed during the briefing. A general stated that our expected casualty number exceeded 50,000. A huge and useless death toll for us, for a generation of young units. Everything was planned. And it was systematic: the elimination of youth.”

Leslie with Colonel Corso in Rome. (image credit: Paola Harris)

D.L.: America has been punished enough, by the drug culture. Many Vietnam veterans came back as drug addicts.

The tape recording ended here. I would again have opportunities to talk to Sir Desmond Leslie, during his visits in Italy. He was a hilariously, eccentric and incredibly intelligent person. Leslie dies in his house in Antibes, France in 2001 at the age of 79.

Kepler's field of view

Sasselov announced Kepler’s discoveries at the TEDGlobal conference (Technology, Entertainment, Design) in Oxford last week.

In April, researchers at the NASA Ames Research Center announced the discovered of roughly 400 Earth-like planets, but NASA sealed its research from the public, citing the need for more time to confirm the existence of these planets.

The launch of Kepler

The Kepler mission launched in March of 2009, and is expected to last four years.

Arecibo Radio Telescope

The study suggests that budget-conscious extraterrestrial scientists would probably be more selective in their broadcasts, limiting their transmissions to frequencies with less astronomical background noise, and sending only short pulses, rather than an energy-hogging continuous broadcasts.

If extraterrestrials attempting to contact us are implementing a more conservative approach than scientists have previously assumed, then adjustments to the “listening” process would be required to prevent those messages from going unnoticed.

This topic was discussed on the July 26, 2010 episode of Open Minds Radio.

As the one previously responsible for MUFON media, and assisting the local MUFON chapter with Symposium press coverage, an advantage I had with the media is MUFON’s serious approach. While some in the UFO community criticize MUFON for not including more controversial subjects, such as channeling and alien communications, the serious scientific focus typically attracts more media friendly coverage. While other conferences give the media more unconventional quotes and subjects to poke fun at, science appears to be not as much of a laughing matter.

Barry Roth, MUFON Media Relations, with a camerwoman from the local CBS affiliate.

Jeff Peckman

Denver is also the place where they will be voting in November whether or not to create a Commission for Extraterrestrial Affairs. The founder of what he calls the Extra Campaign, Jeff Peckman, was present at the MUFON conference. His experiences with the local media have been hot and cold, either way he has gotten a substantial amount of attention himself. The focus of his campaign takes a step further than just determining whether or not there is an extraterrestrial presence, but to actually consider the ramifications of the fact of the presence. Of course this is a much more difficult concept for the public to swallow. It would be expected that such an initiative would be heavily ridiculed, and there is no lack of ridicule that Peckman faces, however he is a likeable guy who chooses his words carefully, and along with his great camera presence, the media has responded much more amenably than they probably would have with a more abrasive or confrontational approach.

Clifford Clift, MUFON Director

Either way, with a healthy presence of Ph.D.s and scientists, a lack of Star Trek uniforms and an abundance of jackets and ties, MUFON provides the perfect venue for representing this phenomena in the way that serious researchers would like it to be presented. I always feel good when I walk into a MUFON Symposium with a skeptic or a media person and they are initially taken aback. As portrayed in the movies, they expect to see a scene similar to a Sci-Fi convention; instead it looks more like a gathering for dentists.

Although MUFON gets accused of having too small a focus, I always think of the saying “Jack of all trades, master of none.”, and their focus is apparently successful. They are still the longest running, largest, and most prolific UFO research organization of them all. You will find in most serious UFO researcher’s biography some sort of affiliation, or position held with MUFON. There is also no lack of organizations that represent the other areas of this research. If you live in Denver, and things go well for Peckman, you may even find yourself on a city commission for Extraterrestrial Affairs. That would be pretty cool.

Articles from the Denver press:

UFO Sightings Explored Through Science

Denver hosts gathering for UFO researchers

UFO Symposium Draws Believers, Experts

10 June 1967, East Woonsocket, Rhode Island                                                                                                    12:00

On 10 June 1967, at about 12:00, noon, Mr. Harold A. Trudel, 29 years old, married and father of 3, was driving his car on West Wrentham Road, in the general vicinity of East Woonsocket, when he pulled over and parked near some hi-tension lines, waiting and watching for what he didn’t know. He had seen UFOs in this area on three previous occasions. He had a loaded camera in the car and he checked it over as he waited. In a matter of minutes a hi-domed disc-shaped metallic flying object approached the power lines from the West.

As the UFO hovered over the lines, Trudel, feeling some considerable degree of insecurity, crouched behind some nearby foliage and began snapping pictures. The object maneuvered about in the area, flitting from point to point like a bee, and Trudel changed his position several times, at times moving in closer to the power lines, but still trying to stay hidden. He did not want any possible occupants of the craft, if occupied, to become aware of his presence.

The UFO remained in sight and he continued to take photographs for about 5 minutes before it flashed off toward the North. Trudel had captured 7 photographs of the strange aerial visitor. The photographer had noted an “antenna” protruding from the central lower portion of the object, but upon later questioning, he said that he did not at any time, see the “antenna” come into contact with the power lines.

First UFO photo taken by Harold Trudel in Woonsocket, Rhode Island, June 10th, 1967. (image credit: Harold Trudel, August C. Roberts)

Second UFO photo taken by Harold Trudel in Woonsocket, Rhode Island, June 10th, 1967. (image credit: Harold Trudel, August C. Roberts)

Third UFO photo taken by Harold Trudel in Woonsocket, Rhode Island, June 10th, 1967. (image credit: Harold Trudel, August C. Roberts)

Forth UFO photo taken by Harold Trudel in Woonsocket, Rhode Island, June 10th, 1967. (image credit: Harold Trudel, August C. Roberts)

When the film was developed, it could clearly be seen that Trudel had obtained some extraordinary evidence indeed. It was generally felt, by those who examined the film at the time, that the photographs were authentic, and that the object itself resembled, to a great degree, the UFO that had been seen to “tap” power lines in Exeter, New Hampshire in the Fall of 1965.

Six days later, on the 16^th, Trudel saw and photographed the same or a similar object, except there was no “antenna” in evidence this time. On 11 July, at 17:10, in the same area, Trudel again saw and photographed the same object again hovering over the power lines. Twenty minutes later 19,000 consumers in the area suffered a complete POWER FAILURE!

First UFO photo taken by Harold Trudel in Woonsocket, Rhode Island, June 16th, 1967. (image credit: Harold Trudel, August C. Roberts)

Second UFO photo taken by Harold Trudel in Woonsocket, Rhode Island, June 16th, 1967. (image credit: Harold Trudel, August C. Roberts)

Corso in Rome, Italy in 1997. (image credit: Paola Harris)

Col. Corso, author of The Day After Roswell passed away 12 years ago today. It was around 8 p.m., in Rome the evening of July 17, 1998, when I received a frantic phone call from fellow journalist and friend Paola Harris. She was calling from Boulder, Colorado. Just few minutes before Paola had been informed of the death of Colonel Philip J. Corso. Stunned and shocked, I couldn’t say anything to comfort her. The next morning I was able to reach Philip Corso, Jr., who confirmed the sad news. It was the first time I ever spoke to Philip Jr. and he very kindly detailed the chain of events surrounding his father’s passing.

Colonel Philip J. Corso had suffered a heart attack in the morning of June 9, 1998. He was in his house in Port St. Lucie, Florida and his close relatives were with him. They decided to rush him to the best medical facility in the area, the Jupiter Medical Center, located less than fifty miles south from Port St Lucie. According to the Jupiter medical staff, the colonel arrived already in critical condition and thought there was no hope of Corso surviving such a massive heart failure. Philip Jr. was informed that there was nothing the family could do, and they should go home. So in their heart, they said goodbye to the old man and returned home. But that same afternoon, the hospital called to notify the family that an unexpected and miraculous improvement had occurred! The doctors had no explanation for it, a nurse found Corso sitting in his bed. He felt perfectly well and he wanted to be discharged immediately, but they kept him there for three days, before he was sent back home in Port St. Lucie. All the family was in awe witnessing his spectacular recovery! Philip Jr. said “I spent every possible moment with dad.  Back home, for few days we managed to keep him isolated from any contact with the outside, even by phone.”  He disagreed all the time and he insisted he felt fine and wanted to return to work. Philip Jr. said “so, we started to put in place his unpublished notes and a pile of documents. You know, there’s plenty of interesting material there. In fact the last three weeks have been very productive. Dad had way more to say.”

Corso in front of the Roman landscape in 1997. (image credit: Paola Harris)

But then the fatal Wednesday, July 15th arrived. Colonel Corso had risen early, looking happy and claiming to feel great. Then, around 9:00 a.m., the grandchildren heard him moaning. He was struck by a second heart attack. Corso was urgently rushed to a different hospital in Palm Beach, where his condition had gradually worsened. On the evening of July 16th the doctors then decided to move him again to the Jupiter Medical Center. Corso died during the transfer. None of his family was with him in the ambulance. He was announced dead upon arrival at 11:15 p.m. Corso’s funeral was held on Wednesday, July 22, 1998, in a military cemetery near Orlando, Florida. Because he was a veteran, the last salute to Philip J. Corso was accompanied by honor guards and the firing of volley shots.

After his father’s death, Philip Jr. noted that in full compliance of his father’s will, the unpublished manuscripts and other precious UFO information would have to be made available in due time, both to researchers and to the public at large. That was what had kept him alive. As Philip Jr. stated, “Now the burden of this responsibility rests on my shoulders. My father informed me of his involvement with the Roswell files only after General Trudeau passed away. Until then he had never said a word to anyone. Then he began to tell us and wanted us all in the family to know, even my sons. My father left us, saying that some people should take care of the material. Among these are you in Italy.”

From left: Actress Ursula Andress, Col. Corso, Dimitri Hamlin, Paola Harris. (image credit: Paola Harris)

My last phone conversation with Colonel Corso occurred during the days he was recovering at home after the first heart attack. His voice sounded to me crystal clear. “Maurizio, you have to work to bring out the truth. We need to start from scratch, we have to have a new science, nothing is more important than this. Try to do everything possible.” I then asked him about his sensational recovery. Corso answered: “My recovery? I’ve got it to their intervention. I was in my hospital bed. At any moment I knew I could die. In my mind I was bright, but I suddenly felt like a hand pressure on my chest and a voice saying to me ‘Don’t be afraid, everything is fine now. We have replaced your heart, and now it will work fine again.’ Here, Maurizio, I’ll stay with you much longer. I promise.” So it was not.

When The Day After Roswell was published, the more conservative and mainstream members of the American UFO community, attacked Corso. Researchers and scientists such as Pflock, Friedman, Hopkins, Jeffries and Randle, just to name a few, criticized many of Corso statements. Unfortunately, Corso died too early to have the opportunity to rebut such allegations. However, during our last phone conversation the colonel mentioned to me two generals who knew of the Roswell file besides General Arthur Trudeau. In 1998 one of them was still alive and could had come forward. But he was still in a prestigious position within Martin Marietta, a major American aerospace industry. “Our agreement was not to speak until our consciousness had ordered us to do it. My moment came when Trudeau died. There is still much to say and to do for the good of future generations.”

More Open Minds stories on Col. Corso:

Colonel claims he briefed Bobby Kennedy on UFOs

Dawn of a New Age – The Philip Corso manuscript

The Philip Corso Legacy

The next day several more stories hit the internet, Xinhua News reported that it was suggested that the UFO was a private plane, although an industry insider had called that speculation “too unprofessional”, and the head of air traffic control for the Zheijiang branch of the Civil Aviation Administration in China said that this explanation was “just a guess”. They also posted two pictures, one had no explanation, while the second was allegedly taken by a Hangzhou resident the night of the airport closing.

First picture posted by ifeng and Xinhua of unknown origin. (image credit: ifeng)

Chinese news site ifeng also posted the second picture with more details on the event. According to ifeng at about 8:30 pm the crew and passengers of a flight preparing to land saw a strange light. The light was not picked up on radar, but to be safe the airport was closed and flights were diverted. Over 2000 passengers faced delays over the incident.

Witnesses had reported the light was not visible for long and disappeared quickly.

The picture was explained as being taken in Hangzhou two hours after the original sighting by Mr. Ma who noticed a light in the sky, ran into his house to get his camera, and snapped this picture. He said the object had yellow and red lights, and disappeared not long after he took his pictures.

Photo taken by a resident in Hangzhou. (image credit: ifeng)

To confuse matters a video appeared on the internet with more alleged UFO pictures and several other pictures that looked similar to the one released by ifeng. Although the video did not specifically say that all of the pictures were from the Chinese event, many website seemed to have assumed so; even Coast to Coast AM posted one of these pictures.

Open Minds Forum (not affiliated with, but friends of OpenMinds.tv) poster elevenaugust – the same researcher who discovered the origins of the Hillary Clinton book we referred to in another story – shed some light on the origins of the other pictures in the video. A few were produced due to helicopters or planes filmed with a long exposure time, making them look like luminous bars. These images were very similar to the ifeng image, causing some to speculate that perhaps that image was produced the same way. Other pictures were of alleged UFOs, but were posted on internet sites years before the Chinese airport event. You can read more about the Open Minds Forum analysis here.

Mistaken identity. Picture from YouTube video mistaken for Chinese UFO photo. Actual picture is of a helicopter in France, 2007. Click image for full description. (image credit: Wikimedia Commons)

In the next few days more stories appeared with varying information. The Global Times reported that the UFO could not be seen by the naked eye. At the end of their story, they also reported another UFO sighting in China that the secretary general of the Xinjiang Astronomy Society had said was part of an intercontinental missile launched by the US.

The China Daily reported that they had been told by a source that investigators had resolved the mystery, but that information was not released yet due to the object being connected to the military. Although this news came out the day after the airport shutdown, nearly a week later, there has still been no official disclosure on the matter.

One of the more interesting angles was a story by Daily Finance, suggesting that perhaps the event helped Chinese airline shares because they had surged after the sighting.

While the story had been garnering the attention of Chinese and UFO related websites, it was finally picked up by US mainstream press by ABC News yesterday. They added to the mystery that a spokesman from the Civil Aviation Administration (CAAC) had confirmed to ABC News that the matter was still under investigation. They also reported that researchers from the Beijing UFO Research Society and the Shanghai UFO Investigative Research Center were traveling to Hangzhou to study the incident. In their video report they also included many of the pictures from the dubious YouTube video referred to earlier.

Official commentary has yet to come, but as the event gains popularity, the world awaits more information. Tidbits that seem to be fabricated, such as one report that people were running in terror from the object, continue to flood the internet, so officials should move fast because the event is quickly taking on a life of its own.

UPDATE:

The LA Times posted a video with their story on the airport incident with the title, Caught on Tape: UFO in China. The video appears to be a missile, and doesn’t fit the description given by the witnesses at the airport. It looks as though the LA Times fell for another YouTuber who posted the video claiming it was from the Chinese airport sighting. I found the same video on YouTube posted by someone else, but this time the YouTuber said that this was actually a missile that was seen over the countries of Kazakhstan and Kyrgystan. Sure enough, after a search I found the original posting of the video which was taken on June 30^th in a town called Bishkek in Kryrgystan. Here is a link to a Russian site that had posted the video on July 1^st, and this is a translation of a story on the sighting. You can read the original Russian story here.

It is surprising that major news sources such as ABC and the LA Times would make such large mistakes, misleading the public and using anonymous YouTube video postings.

More Links:

China Reverses Itself on UFO that Disrupted Air Traffic

UFO scares the bejeezus out of Hangzhou, causes airport closure

Chinese UFO still a mystery

1960’s: PATAGONIAN USOS

When UFOs are reported entering and leaving bodies of water, whether the oceans, seas, large rivers or lakes, they are designated USOs for Unidentified Sea (or Submarine) Objects. In the 1960’s, the Argentinean Navy seemed to have its hands full with mysterious USO activity around the southern Patagonian coast. Official USO reports were rarely released by the Navy, but some cases were nevertheless tracked by two pioneer civilian ufologists. Both had excellent qualifications: Dr. Oscar A. Galindez was a judge and Oscar A. Uriondo worked in the Library of Congress in Buenos Aires. The two “Oscars” were the first to conduct a systematic scientific field investigation in the open, publishing their reports in books and articles. We can outline the following USO cases in Patagonia:

• Feb. 1960: The Navy detected two USOs in Golfo [Gulf] Nuevo and tried to catch them for two weeks. US Navy experts came to help with special sub-hunting equipment, but to no avail. Tons of explosives were used but the USOs got away, still unidentified. The late Ivan Sanderson, a British author specialized in USOs, wrote that the Golfo Nuevo subs “were able to stay submerged for several days and could outrun the surface ships… All nations owning submarines denied emphatically that the subs were theirs.”

• Nov. 12, 1963: Oscar Uriondo in his classic 1968 book, The Scientific Problem of UFOs, summarized another intriguing case from Golfo Nuevo: “The Navy transport ship ‘Punta Medanos’ was navigating on the South Atlantic facing Golfo Nuevo. Suddenly, a large UFO crossed rapidly at 2 km from the ship; although the passage was very quick, the needles on the compasses onboard jumped off course abruptly and continued to do so for 55 minutes.” The Navy Commission was unable to explain the case, and recruited the assistance of the Hydrographic Service to check the electromagnetic effect (EME) on the compasses. In the end, they could find no conventional explanation for the EME other than “the presence of the UFO.”

• July 28, 1964: Several USO cases are mentioned by Dr. Galindez in a 1974 article entitled, “Marine Implications of the UFO Phenomenon.” The judge revealed another USO case in the Patagonian Golfo San Jorge, involving two Argentinean oil tankers and the Norwegian vessel ‘Sumber.’ All these ships observed after 9 PM the apparent fall of an object, perhaps “an aerolite or small comet.” However, it was flying “horizontally” and “emitted a luminosity that, at times, became intense,” according to the official report submitted by the ‘Sumber’ skipper to Argentinean naval authorities. The ships looked for possible survivors, but nothing was found. This case has certain similarities to the famous Canadian 1967 UFO crash in Shag Harbour, Nova Scotia.

• March 18, 1966: The crash of a cigar-shaped object on the ocean was reported and sketched by farmer Carlos Corosan from a deserted beach near Deseado, south of Golfo San Jorge. Corosan had a good view of the object at 4 PM, estimating it was 65 to 70 feet long, with a metallic appearance and no wings, windows or markings. The UFO seemed to be in trouble, emitting “a short, muffled blast of smoke,” and then began to hum and “vibrate all over as though it were coming apart,” said Corosan. The farmer added the object finally hit the sea, but “it did not float at all, it just hit the water with a huge splash and went down quickly.” As far as we know, Corosan was the only witness, although Navy ships were reportedly seen in the area later on. The military neither confirmed nor denied his account.

1965: ANTARCTICA WAVE

Navy Captain Daniel Perissé (image credit: MUFON Proceedings)

One of the best documented Navy cases occurred at Deception Island, which belongs to the South Shetland Islands west of the Antarctic Peninsula in the Argentinean sector. Three nations (Argentina, Chile and Britain) maintained research stations in 1965 in this island of volcanic origin, formed by the remains of a crater flooded by the sea [see Map]. A detailed report of these sightings was prepared by Captain Daniel A. Perissé, who was in 1965 commanding officer of the Argentinean Navy garrison in Deception Island with the rank of Lieutenant. A total of seven UFO sightings occurred there between June 7 and July 3, 1965. An eighth incident followed in August at the Argentinean post at the South Orkney Islands.

On July 7, the Argentinean Navy Bulletin #172 stated that, “Lt. Perissé confirmed… that all the garrison personnel observed an extremely brilliant object, moving toward the north with variable speed, sometimes hovering, displaying sudden accelerations and changes of direction. The characteristics of the object and its motion, added Lt. Perisse, were such that the possibility of a weather balloon, a plane or a star were ruled out. The object was observed by a total of 17 persons, including three visiting Non-commissioned officers from the Chilean base ‘Pedro Aguirre Cerda’.”

The Chilean Air Force, in charge of the Antarctic bases ‘Aguirre Cerda’ and ‘Arturo Prat,’ confirmed their own UFO sightings in Deception Island with an official communiqué released the same day. “According to a message sent by Commander Mario Jahn Barrera from the Antarctic Chilean base ‘Arturo Prat,’ a luminous object was sighted for about 20 minutes by nine members of the garrison who were performing routine meteorological observations. It changed colors, speeds and direction, moving with an oscillatory motion at high speed.”

Capt. Perissé published later a thorough analysis of the sightings and particularly the more spectacular one on July 3. First seen by nine witnesses at the Chilean base beginning at 7:20 PM, the object moved to the Argentinean base by 7:42, where it was seen by 17 witnesses for 62 minutes, until 8:44 PM. Perissé wrote that “the shape of the object was similar to a rugby ball… with a red center and ill defined edges of changing colors (yellow, green, orange, blue and white)… The actual size of the UFO was somewhere between 75 and 90 meters.” There is still one more mystery concerning the July 3 event. The Navy Bulletin #172 quoted above added that, “from the Navy post at the South Orkney Islands comes a message of extreme importance: during the passage of the strange object over the base [earlier the same day], two magnetometers in perfect working condition registered sudden and strong disturbances of the magnetic field (at 17:03 Hrs.), which were recorded on their tapes.”

The public interest generated by these cases led the Navy to rescue the “problem from semi-clandestiness,” as put by the Director of the Navy UFO project, Capt. Pagani. In a famous 1965 press conference quoted in Part I, Pagani declared that “UFOs exist” and “their presence and intelligent displacement in Argentinean airspace has been proven.” There were no known photos taken during the July and August 1965 UFO flap in Deception Island, but in late 1967 the well known Argentinean weekly magazine Siete Días (Seven Days) published a very interesting UFO photo reportedly taken by a navy officer in the island during an underwater volcanic eruption on December 11, 1967 (see photo). Its authenticity, however, remains in question because the photographer’s name was never disclosed or identified.

Flying disc next to an underwater volcanic eruption reportedly taken on Dec. 11, 1967 by a Navy officer at the Antarctic Station in Deception Is., leaked to the weekly magazine Siete Días. The disc on the top is the real size of the object; the second an enlargement. (image credit: ICUFON Archives)

The Deception Island UFO flap was also covered in some detail by the U.S. military attachés stationed in Buenos Aires and Santiago, Chile, who digested and translated the local press coverage and the reports published in the Argentinean Navy Bulletin. These documents, released by the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) years ago under the Freedom of Information Act, can be downloaded here.

Interestingly, the Deception Island incidents launched Capt. Perissé’s ufological career: first under the Navy Commission and, after his retirement from the service in 1984, as a civilian ufologist with the groups CEFAI and CIU, and in the 1990s with a semi-official study group within the Institute of Scientific and Technological Research of the Armed Forces (CITEFA in Spanish). Perissé presented a scientific paper full of charts and mathematical formulas entitled, “Correlation Between the UFO Phenomenon and Its Associated Entities,” at the MUFON International UFO Symposium at the American University in Washington, DC in July 1987, where I had the opportunity of meeting him.

View of Deception Island (image credit: Jerzy Strzelecki)

Location map of Deception Island in the South Shetland Islands (image credit: Giovanni Fattori over a GMT free license map)

THE AAF TAKES OVER

As the Navy UFO project was winding down and finally closed in 1974, the Argentinean Air Force (AAF) investigation was taking shape. The first public hint was provided by Brigadier Adolfo Alvarez, Commander in Chief of the AAF, in a radio interview in July 1968. The transcript was published in the influential Buenos Aires newspaper La Razón. When asked about flying saucers, Gen. Alvarez responded that “the Air Force has a specialized agency that has conducted investigations about this field for some time.” He cautioned, however, that he was not yet able to give a definitive opinion about the subject since “there are no sufficiently concrete facts.” Also in 1968, the military president of Argentina, General Juan Carlos Onganía, declared that, “I believe that flying saucers exist.”

AAF Captain Augusto Lima, head of the last UFO desk at the Air Force’s National Commission on Space Research. (image credit: Alejandro Agostinelli)

With the exception of the early reports published by the National Review of Aeronautics, the AAF UFO policy was never as open as that of the Navy. It eventually transpired that the man in charge of UFO investigations was Captain Augusto Lima, who worked at the AAF’s National Commission for Space Research (Spanish acronym of CNIE), Argentina’s main space agency. Unfortunately, the CNIE investigations were kept confidential and no reports were leaked to the press or to civilian ufologists. Moreover, according to journalist Alejandro Agostinelli, “Capt. Lima attempts to project a dispassionate image, but in private conversations he confesses that the totality of UFO sightings can be reduced to conventional explanations. Lima keeps busy receiving and particularly filing UFO data from the different military services. He conducts eventually an official investigation of cases which, in his view, have received too much publicity. He then proceeds to explain them away… Most investigators agree that Capt. Lima continues to hold a ‘chair’ in that Department for purely bureaucratic reasons.”

Nevertheless, a few interesting cases did leak to the press. During a flap in 1971, for instance, AAF pilot Francisco Sartorio filmed an unidentified object with a 16 mm movie camera while flying in Mar de Plata [see picture]. As far as we know, neither the full film nor the official report and analysis have been released. There are also reports that the CNIE obtained some metallic debris which reportedly came down from space. In early January 1979, news about small metallic pieces recovered in the rural area of General Ocampo in  Entre Rios province, surfaced briefly. The discovery was tied to a multi-colored UFO observed by hundreds of witnesses in the region on the night of December 21, 1978. On the following days, peasant Miguel Angel Romero went to work in the rice fields as he usually did, when he came across a piece of semi-hollowed bluish metal with a diameter of about 15 cm and a thickness of 2 mm. Another similar piece made its way during the same period to the newspaper El Heraldo in Concordia. Both were eventually requested by the CNIE for laboratory analysis.

AAF pilot Francisco Sartorio filmed this object with a 16 mm movie camera while flying in Mar de Plata in 1971. (image credit: J. J. Benítez)

When contacted by the weekly magazine Siete Días, AAF officers indicated that the piece, popularly referred to as “a door handle,” was made out of a very strong alloy resistant to the friction produced by contact with the atmosphere. They added that the piece was not part of a plane or a weather balloon, although they did not say what it was. More sensational was the crash of another alleged UFO on the evening of October 3, 1980 in a remote Andean area in the province of Río Negro, close to the Chilean border. The UFO had been sighted in the provinces of Río Negro and Neuquén, as well as in Chile, and there were several accounts of a loud explosion which shook the earth.

Despite the efforts of a group of Buenos Aires ufologists to reach the site in the high Andes, it was the Border Police and Capt. Lima who eventually located the crash site from a helicopter. They retrieved ash-like samples from what appeared to be three charred circular marks on the ground, but no further information on the contents of the samples was published. To this day, no final report on these or other cases investigated by the CNIE were ever released. By the mid-1980’s, however, the CNIE UFO project had practically faded away. The military lost political power after their defeat in the Falklands War with Britain in 1983 and were now facing budgetary cuts and renewed scrutiny from the new civilian democratic government. UFOs were no longer a priority. The CNIE project was finally closed officially with Capt. Lima’s retirement in 1987.

This attitude became evident in the case of airline pilot Capt. Jorge Polanco, who reported a close observation of a UFO while his Aerolinas Argentinas flight 734 from Buenos Aires was approaching Bariloche airport around midnight on July 31, 1995. The sighting coincided with a power blackout in the city (not uncommon in South America). Although Capt. Polanco was very outspoken to the media afterwards, stating that he thought it was an “extraterrestrial spaceship,” both AAF and the Civil Aviation authorities declined to make any public statements, giving the impression that they were not at all interested in the incident.

UPDATE: THE CITEFA EFFORT

Captain Daniel Perissé (left) with journalist Alejandro Agostinelli (right) during a UFO Congress in San Lorenzo in 1991. (image credit: Rubén Morales)

This total lack of official interest, however, was not entirely true. In the 1990s, a group of retired military officers and some scientists associated with the Institute of Scientific and Technological Research of the Armed Forces (Spanish acronym of CITEFA) attempted to revive an official military UFO project, tentatively named Commission for the Study of Space Phenomena (Spanish acronym CEFE) or National Investigations Commission for Anomalous Phenomena (Spanish acronym CNIFA). Although the group avoided any publicity and media attention whatsoever, veteran Buenos Aires journalist and ufologist Alejandro Agostinelli was eventually able to track them down. The group’s leader was Commodore (Ret.) Juan Carlos Mascietti, who served as chief of planning for the General Staff during the democratic government of President Alfonsín in the 1980s and secretary general of CITEFA. Other key members were Capt. Perissé and speleologist Julio Goyén Aguado, president of the Argentinean Center of Speleology, who had close links with the military. After being dodged by Agostinelli for months, Commodore Mascietti finally agreed to do a very short interview for the science magazine Descubrir (Discover).

“We are acting prudently because we are not interested in getting involved in any noise,” said Mascietti. “Moreover, we need to protect the privacy of scientists who are not interested in seeing their names in the headlines. Also, due to the characteristics of this type of work, we don’t want to contaminate or being contaminated.” When asked by Agostinelli if the CITEFA group had official backing, Mascietti responded that, “not yet, the group is formed by military and scientific personnel linked to official circles, but the support it receives is informal. We are hoping that the Ministry of Defense will officialize our activities, that’s all.”

Agostinelli then asked him for his opinion on UFOs and Mascietti’s response was very cautious: “Our compromise is not to reveal personal opinions. One shared criteria is that we must be skeptical. Another is that there are certain phenomena that must be explained. We are not interested in games: more than ufologists, we are scientists who are searching for the truth.” Despite Mascietti’s cautious statements, the CITEFA members were seen in various parts of Argentina investigating UFO cases and collecting data. They compiled eventually a 300-page report that was officially given to the Ministry of Defense in 1997. This report has never been released, but according to Agostinelli, it concluded that there are “unidentified phenomena which leave physical effects that can be proved,” even though “this does not show evidence on the nature of this phenomena, which remains without explanation.” Despite the group’s efforts, however, the Ministry of Defense never gave the go ahead for the UFO project, which faded away by the end of the decade due to several circumstances—some tragic—with its key members. Commodore Mascietti left CITEFA and moved out of Buenos Aires, Capt. Perissé became seriously ill and passed away a few years later, and Goyén Aguado died in an accident in 2000.

We contacted Alejandro Agostinelli by email recently to ask him about the CEFORA motion to request President Cristina Fernández to release official UFO documents in Argentina. His response was not optimistic: “In our country, you have to fight in government offices with lower level personnel to obtain these types of documents, not request them politely with signatures to a president that has to deal with very serious problems every single day. At best, she will smile and pass the request to an official with the recommendation of giving an evasive answer. To show interest in cooperating with a UFO request represents for a government reasonably paranoid with the press like this one, a risk of negative publicity that they don’t want to face.”

Agostinelli added that he doesn’t want to discourage the efforts made by CEFORA, especially since “my own efforts to obtain any type of documents came empty handed. But I understand that the reasons why I didn’t succeed in obtaining official documents become harder with the passing of time. The middle level civilian or military official usually doesn’t stay too long in his post; if they don’t give much importance to these papers, they can be lost; and if they are interested, they take them to their homes.” In any event, time will tell if the CEFORA motion will succeed.

Those who read Spanish, can check the CEFORA website here.

Alejandro Agostinelli’s complete report in Spanish, “The UFO Dossiers of the Argentinean Armed Forces,” can be read here.