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.

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.

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