COMETA report

The COMETA report (UFOs and Defense: What Should We Prepare For?; French Les OVNI et la Défense: À quoi doit-on se préparer?) is an unofficial 1999 study of unidentified flying objects and national defense, written by COMETA (Comité d'Études Approfondies, the Committee for In-Depth Studies), a private association of retired French generals, engineers and scientists chaired by the retired Air Force general Denis Letty. Its conclusion holds that studies by the French space agency and others "demonstrate the almost certain physical reality of completely unknown flying objects with remarkable flight performances and noiselessness, apparently operated by intelligent [beings]", and that "a single hypothesis sufficiently takes into account the facts and, for the most part, only calls for present-day science": the hypothesis of extraterrestrial visitors. The committee grew out of the auditors' association of the Institut des Hautes Études de Défense Nationale and drew on the case files of GEPAN and its successor SEPRA, the state's UFO-investigation unit at the space agency CNES, whose head Jean-Jacques Velasco is reported to have submitted the report to Prime Minister Lionel Jospin in 1999. The government made no official response beyond the interest Jospin's chief of staff reportedly showed, and the 3AF's Sigma Commission later presented itself as heir to the committee's work.

The authors wrote that the extraterrestrial hypothesis "certainly has not been categorically proven, but strong presumptions exist in its favor". The Paris weekly L'Express headed its August 1999 coverage "Ovnis: un rapport délirant", and the sociologist Pierre Lagrange told it that the report set aside recent thinking on UFOs and that its extraterrestrial model seemed to come straight out of the 1950s, an objection the report's own Roswell appendix anticipated by naming Lagrange among those it holds to be affected by what it calls simplified disinformation.

The committee

In 1976 a committee of the IHEDN chaired by General Blanchard of the Gendarmerie Nationale opened the UFO file, and its recommendations were followed in the creation of GEPAN. In February 1995 General Letty organised a conference on unidentified aerospace phenomena at the Air School, where former pilots described encounters of their own, and in March 1995 he put to General Bernard Norlain, then director of the IHEDN, his plan for a new fact-finding committee; Norlain referred him to the IHEDN Auditors Association, which gave its support. The committee worked informally from 1996 and was registered as a non-profit association under the French law of 1901 on 24 February 1999.

Letty named as members who worked on the study for close to three years Michel Algrin, Pierre Bescond, Denis Blancher, Jean Dunglas, Bruno Le Moine, Françoise Lépine, Christian Marchal, Marc Merlo and Alain Orszag, among them a lawyer, an engineer general, a chief of police, an air force general, an admiral and a research director of the national aerospace research office ONERA, and thanked as contributors Velasco, the Fleximage chief executive François Louange, the former Air France technical director Edmond Campagnac, and the pilots and officials who gave testimony. The former CNES chairman André Lebeau wrote a foreword, in which he hoped the report would help strip the phenomenon of UFOs "of its irrational layer", and Norlain a preface, in which he described the committee's members as people who "have, or had during the course of their careers, important responsibilities in defense, industry, teaching, research or various central administrations". The association became dormant around 2006[citation needed] and the report's circulation was limited by copyright restrictions.

Contents

The report has three parts and a set of recommendations, with appendices on radar detection in France, astronomers' sightings, life in the universe, the colonization of space, the Roswell affair and disinformation, a chronology of the phenomenon, and the psychological, sociological and political aspects of the subject.

The first part sets out cases in which pilots, radar operators and other witnesses reported objects: three testimonies of French civilian and military pilots, five aeronautical cases from around the world, three sightings from the ground, and four close encounters in France. The French pilot testimonies include the Mirage IV crew over Dijon on 7 March 1977, and the January 1994 sighting by Air France flight AF 3532, whose inquiry involved the Air Force's air operations command center; the foreign cases include the August 1956 Lakenheath–Bentwaters radar and visual sightings in England, the September 1976 Tehran UFO incident, the March 1990 Pereslavl-Zalessky case reported by the Soviet air defense commander General Igor Maltsev, and a 1995 Argentine airliner case near San Carlos de Bariloche; and the close encounters include Valensole in 1965 and Trans-en-Provence in 1981, which the report says has been the subject of in-depth studies "proving that something did in fact land on the ground and parked there". It states that none of these cases has been explained, adding that investigations usually trace reports to known causes, and a chapter of counterexamples lists French reports that the gendarmerie or GEPAN/SEPRA traced to the moon, planets, aircraft and similar causes.

The second part describes how research is organised in France and abroad, the methods and results of GEPAN and SEPRA, including their category D of well-documented cases for which no explanation was found, and the hypotheses advanced for the phenomenon. The authors sorted those hypotheses into ascientific ones ("We are being manipulated without realizing it", whether by a secret group, by strange, unknown or extraterrestrial beings, by spirits, by the devil or by psychological fantasies, together with parapsychological phenomena, collective hallucination and visitors from humanity's own future), the secret weapons of a superpower, disinformation attempts, holographic images, unknown natural phenomena, and extraterrestrial hypotheses. They held the first group to be unprovable and so of little use, wrote that secret craft of earthly origin "can only explain a minority of cases", and treated the extraterrestrial hypotheses at length, including a scenario by the astronomers Jean-Claude Ribes and Guy Monnet in which human descendants settle asteroids and travel between stars, which they said gives the extraterrestrial hypothesis "a certain degree of plausibility". The report notes that a model of magnetohydrodynamic technology that could propel craft in the atmosphere "has been well developed", and the review by Knuth and colleagues adds that it lists technologies that could account for the reported flight performance, witness paralysis and the stopping of vehicle engines.

The third part takes up the strategic, aeronautical, scientific and technical, political and religious, and media implications of the extraterrestrial hypothesis, asking who the visitors are, what they intend, and whether any state has already made contact. It records that no UFO has been the certain cause of an accident or hostile act, that confirmed sightings date from 1944, and that craft of terrestrial origin could only be American and their existence would long since have been known, and in its chapter on political and religious implications it concludes that the confirmation of visitors would not necessarily shatter religions founded on a God or a creative order.

The Roswell appendix, headed "indisputable facts", sets out the events of the 1947 Roswell incident as the committee reads them, with the United States Air Force's 1994 explanation of the debris as the remains of a Project Mogul balloon, and argues that the Air Force report cut witness testimony down to fit that explanation and that the disappearance of base files shows United States military personnel to be hiding something important. It distinguishes "simplified disinformation", which it says works on those who do not want to accept the extraterrestrial hypothesis, from "enhanced disinformation", which it says is aimed at others, and it cites as instances of the first the treatment of the Lakenheath, RB-47 and Tehran cases by Philip J. Klass, whom it calls hardly convincing, and the way the Roswell author Karl Pflock handles witness affidavits in his book. The same appendix recalls the Robertson Panel of December 1952, convened by the Central Intelligence Agency, whose recommendation to strip the UFO phenomenon of its aura of mystery the report describes as the intensification of a disinformation policy.

Recommendations

The conclusion holds that the UFO problem "cannot be eliminated by mere caustic and offhand witticisms" and that civilian and military pilots hesitate to speak of what they have seen chiefly from fear of appearing ridiculous, alienated or gullible. The committee made six recommendations: to inform political, military and administrative decision-makers and aircraft and helicopter pilots through a gradual campaign aimed at the defense and civilian schools; to increase the human and material resources of SEPRA; to consider detection of UFOs by civilian and military space surveillance systems; to create a unit at the highest level of the state to work with SEPRA, with an annual budget of a few million francs; to make diplomatic approaches to the United States, supported by other states and the European Union, urging it to collaborate; and to plan measures for a spectacular and indisputable manifestation, such as an overt attempt at contact or a landing before numerous witnesses.

Publication and circulation

The report first appeared as a special issue of the weekly VSD, which on 16 July 1999 carried it to a circulation of 70,000 copies thanks to the journalist Bernard Thouanel, and Velasco is reported to have submitted it to Prime Minister Jospin that year. L'Express covered it on 5 August 1999 as the work of a "private committee" led by a general. Jospin's chief of staff, Olivier Schrameck, read and annotated the report "to mark his interest" on receiving it. A French edition from Éditions du Rocher followed in 2003. GEIPAN, the successor to GEPAN and SEPRA, opened its case files online in 2007.

Legacy

The Sigma Commission, created by the 3AF in 2007, presents itself as heir to the French work done within the retired officers' group behind the report, and its May 2010 progress report stated that the central hypothesis proposed by the COMETA report is perfectly credible. Jean Charles Moyen, who describes a French Secret Space Program, cites the report as a precedent for official French transparency on the subject.

Open questions

References

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