What happened
In July 1999 a 90-page study titled 'UFOs and Defence: What Should We Prepare For?' landed in France, sent beforehand to President Jacques Chirac and Prime Minister Lionel Jospin. Its authors called themselves COMETA, the Committee for In-Depth Studies: a group largely drawn from former auditors of the Institute of Higher National Defence Studies (IHEDN), chaired by retired Air Force General Denis Letty, with a preface by General Bernard Norlain, a former IHEDN director, and a preamble by André Lebeau, former head of the space agency CNES. The report reviewed pilot and radar cases from France and abroad, close encounters such as Valensole and Trans-en-Provence, and propulsion ideas like magnetohydrodynamics. It concluded that the physical reality of controlled, intelligently guided UFOs was almost certain, and that the extraterrestrial hypothesis was the most probable explanation, while stressing it was unproven, and urged defence planning and international cooperation.
The official explanation
COMETA was a private association registered in 1999, not a government commission, and the report was never officially endorsed. Critics, including the news magazine L'Express, derided its conclusions, and skeptics argued it selected favourable cases and treated the extraterrestrial hypothesis as a conclusion rather than a question. Some opponents dismissed the members as retirees, a characterisation researcher Patrick Gross disputes.
The anomalous case
The weight of COMETA lies in who signed it. Its authors and sponsors included a former director of the national defence institute, a former president of the French space agency, retired generals, an admiral, a senior police official and a research director at ONERA, France's aerospace research agency, as well as Jean-Jacques Velasco, then head of CNES's SEPRA UFO unit. These were people with access to French military and space data and no obvious reason to court ridicule. After reviewing cases with radar support and trained observers, they wrote that the physical reality of UFOs was almost certain and that secret weapons, hallucination and natural causes did not account for the best cases. Jospin's chief of staff said the prime minister read and annotated the report to mark his interest, and GEIPAN made an archive of it public in 2007.
The strongest argument that this was something genuinely unknown or classified, with each claim attributed to the person who made it.
Sources
- COMETA report Wikipedia
- French report COMETA, 1999 Patrick Gross, UFOs at close sight
Witness reports elsewhere
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