The Swan's Song. Page updated and simplified on August 13, 2009
The Swan's Song
January 1st, 2008 - Page reprinted (and simplified) on August 13, 2009
When the CNES announced in 2005 the creation of a "new service," the GEIPAN (Group for the Study and Information on Unidentified Aerospace Phenomena), I wanted to know more. I was able to call Yves Sillard, former president of the CNES, by phone. Or rather, as he no longer had a CNES office, he called me back after I had sent him a letter. The call lasted almost an hour. I learned more during that exchange than in thirty years of speculation. Sillard told me:
- It was me who, in 1977, created the GEPAN and only me, when I was president of the CNES.
I think he is telling the truth. What was his motivation? Only he knows. Perhaps he had witnessed a UFO. Having created the GEPAN with a single stroke of the pen, he entrusted Hubert Curien, who was then director of the CNES, with the task of "handling the details." Curien carried out this task by following a sort of standard and logical protocol.
- Well, UFOs relate to different fields. There is, at the CNES, a guy who is dying to run a mess like this, it's engineer Claude Poher (at the time head of the "rockets-sounding rockets" department). Let's put him in there. Poher, a house engineer, is far from being a genius. Let's have him supervised by a council bringing together "quality" scientists. Let's see... we need a "cosmos expert." Let's take Roland Omnès, rector of the Orsay University, a cosmology specialist. Gilbert Payan told me that J.P. Petit had done some things in MHD. That's plasma physics. At the CNRS there is a guy who is an authority in this field, it's the polytechnician René Pellat (deceased). Let's count him in this group. And then I need, let's see... a meteorologist. Christian Perrin de Brichambaud, a polytechnician (deceased), is a high-ranking official at the National Meteorological Service. That will do, that's three. I need an astronomer. Guy Monnet (a polytechnician), director of the Lyon Observatory (at the time) is not bad. I need a policeman. Commander Cochereau will do. And a psychiatrist: Faure. I add Gruau, the general secretary of the CNES, to manage everything and "ensure the proper functioning of this service." That makes seven people, which is a good number.
Then Curien left the place to "live its life." He died a year ago, I believe, and never showed any interest in the UFO file. Witness his comment when he was interviewed at the time of the creation of the GEIPAN:
- But... today the big wave of interest in UFOs is over, isn't it?
(He is perfectly right on this point.)
Translation: For Curien, the UFO phenomenon is a social phenomenon, on the same level as the search for the sea serpent, the abominable snowman, or spontaneous human combustion. If it had been necessary to create a group of this kind, he would have included a historian, an oceanographer, a zoologist, and a psychiatrist in the council....
I have spoken enough about this lamentable French UFO saga in my books to not go into all the details again. In any case, it is a social phenomenon, which our society completely controls, in its own way. So much so that today the UFO has "completely melted into the background." The subject is 100% folkloric. All television channels have a small sound clip resembling that of a rattle, which is added to the images every time the file is reopened. Remember the show on Stéphane Bern (by the way, heavily censored in the editing):
The speech has become standardized. For three decades and since 1977, we hear the same old tune, recited by the proponents of politically correct journalism:
- France is the only country that has set up a specialized service for collecting information related to the UFO phenomenon.
Everything is in place for it to continue for another thirty years. For thirty years, the gendarmerie has been entrusted with conducting field investigations. They have therefore drawn up gendarmerie reports applying the instructions specific to their profession. As Patenet had told me, who was in charge of putting online what he had inherited after Vélasco was sidelined:
- You shouldn't expect the moon. These reports are in all respects similar to those you could read regarding a road accident.
Therefore, on the "data collection" side: a strictly zero result in thirty years, with one exception: the biological analyses carried out by Michel Bounias, research director at the National Institute of Agronomic Research in Avignon, in 1981, following a UFO landing in Trans-en-Provence. There is absolutely nothing else in thirty years of activity. But Yves Sillard writes, in a book he supervised, "that the CNES was able to develop a rigorous scientific methodology."
Professor Michel Bounias in his laboratory in 1981
If he is convinced of this, so much the better for him. But know that the GEIPAN is going back with the same strategy. As stated in this collective work, in which Patenet participated, "the gendarmerie reports constitute the raw material on which the GEIPAN works." In other words, the members of the GEIPAN (currently limited to one man, an IT specialist, and external collaborators who will be instructed to assess the gendarmerie reports) will continue to ask questions such as:
- Where was Venus that day? Does the witness have a psychiatric history? Was there a planned atmospheric re-entry? Do you think this photo could be a fake? What do the astronomers say? What about a meteor shower? Etc.
Addition of August 13, 2009: between December 2008, Patenet's retirement, and August 2009, nothing at all has passed through the GEIPAN, according to information provided by external collaborators. Activity... none.
It will yield absolutely nothing. Nothing more than what emerged after "thirty years of rigorous scientific study." The tragedy is that when Sillard writes that this constitutes a scientific approach marked by rigor, he believes it. The same goes for Patenet.
After having spoken to Sillard on the phone, early 2005, I contacted Patenet in Toulouse. He was at the time preparing the arduous online publication of the Gepan-Sepra archives (completely devoid of interest). At one point he told me:
- Our work does not consist of doing research. We, we collect the data. After that, it will be up to the scientists to react.
I immediately wanted to tell him:
- But, you fool, a high-level scientist who, himself, "reacted," who has done a lot of work on the subject, published articles in scientific journals, you have him on the line. So, what are you doing?
He just said to me:
- We would need a scientific council...
I am not sure that an engineer like Patenet knows exactly what a "scientist" is. To approach the UFO file with weight, it would be necessary
- People who have cutting-edge scientific knowledge in all fields, who are also motivated and... talented.
It is not enough to be well-qualified, armed with knowledge, to be able to react to something totally exotic and puzzling. Moreover, the phenomenon is not...