Death of Michel Bounias, INRA
Michel Bounias has died
May 2003
Who cares? Who talks about it? This death will leave no trace in the mainstream press. Yet this man undoubtedly made one of the most important contributions to science in our time, and to the history of our planet.
In 1981, a disc-shaped object landed in broad daylight on a "restanque" in Trans-en-Provence, a small town in the Var department. The craft cleared a row of trees and crashed into the ground, resting on three legs resembling "cement buckets," according to Renato Nicolaï, the sole Italian eyewitness, who observed the object from about twenty meters away, sheltered behind a small wall.
Then the device took off again and disappeared. Nicolaï did not report to the gendarmerie or the GEPAN. But his wife talked about it, and eventually a gendarme collected his testimony, despite his reluctance (he feared being seen as crazy). Fortuitously, this gendarme collected simple lucerne plants from both inside and outside a circular trace measuring one and a half meters in diameter. He had the good idea to collect the soil samples as well. All of this was sent to the GEPAN in Toulouse, which was then directed by polytechnician Alain Esterle, succeeding engineer Claude Poher. These samples were collected at the initiative of the gendarme and did not follow the "guidelines issued by the GEPAN," which had decided to only investigate ground traces under the following conditions:
- If there were multiple witnesses
- If it had not rained...
Yet there was only one witness, and the landing site had been thoroughly washed by rain between the event and the sample collection. The samples arrived in Toulouse, and it would take three weeks before they reached the bench of Michel Bounias, Research Director at INRA Avignon (Institute for Agronomic Research). Fortunately, his expertise placed him in an exceptionally favorable position to analyze plant trauma, as he had completed his thesis at the CEA, focusing on plant alterations caused by ionizing radiation.
Very quickly, Bounias—capable of conducting analyses on even the tiniest fragments—detected significant anomalies in the "pigment equipment of plants" (chlorophylls A and B, carotene, phaeophytin, violaxanthin, etc.). He requested systematic analysis with samples taken every meter, emphasizing that the information contained in the samples could be preserved (literally and figuratively) by storing them in liquid carbon dioxide. The analysis revealed an extraordinary phenomenon-distance correlation (I will complete this file later; this is a first, rapid draft). As Aimé Michel and Pierre Guérin noted at the time: "Scientific ufology was born that day."
What is extraordinary is that these biological traces are not only very clear, but also durable. Bounias periodically monitored the site, demonstrating that normal conditions would return within 18 months! He had thus created a fantastic "UFO trap" that was simply waiting to function. An obscure ufologist, Michel Figuet, a night watchman, proposed a personal hypothesis: these alterations were due to cement projections, and the circular traces, resembling skid marks, were linked to the movement of Nicolaï’s concrete mixer. A brilliant "ufological" contribution.
Annoyed, Bounias nevertheless conducted verification tests—negative. Cement has no effect on plant pigment systems. To date, nothing known—except for a megarad radiation—could cause such alterations. A year later, the so-called "Amarante case" occurred: an UFO hovered under the eyes of a CNRS researcher in his small garden. The plants there—amaranth—were so affected that the trauma was visible to the naked eye.
- Bounias was not invited to collect and analyze the samples himself—gendarmes did it, but they "did not preserve the plants in their soil, instead cutting the stems and placing the samples in plastic bags where they... rotted."
- It was in an advanced state of decomposition that the samples reached a university biology lab in Toulouse, which could extract nothing from them.
What happened? Despite clear instructions from Bounias—completely excluded from the process—did all the GEPAN personnel suddenly become idiots? Of course not. Immediately after this breakthrough in Trans, the ETCA (Central Technical Establishment of the Armed Forces), a military analysis laboratory, easily replicated Bounias’s modest lab, and it was there that the properly collected samples ended up. Meanwhile, the cut and cooked plants were used for a fraudulent analysis—of which, sadly, nothing useful could be extracted.
There were other Trans-en-Provence cases, but this time the system, tightly sealed, operated without anyone noticing the samples pass through. Remember: gendarmes, these "good-natured pandoras," are first and foremost military personnel, bound by secrecy. Meanwhile, things turned ugly: Bounias faced difficulties and hostility from INRA leadership. But the Army didn’t care. It had gotten what it wanted. The "capture of expertise" had been satisfactorily achieved. The author of the analytical method, the one who had struck the jackpot, could now go to hell. It was even desirable that these difficulties discourage him from pursuing research in this direction. Everything was thus put in place to deter him.
The capture of expertise continued. Shortly after Trans-en-Provence, Bounias and I requested to present a simulation before the GEPAN scientific council, proposing to expose control lucerne samples to pulsed microwaves at 3 gigahertz, pulsed at low frequency. Waveguide dimensions: 5 mm by 5 mm. A simple "bench experiment" using a modest source that a lab like Thourel’s DERMO (Department for Research on Microwaves, linked to GEPAN) could have lent. But here’s the detail: these microwaves do not exist in nature. They are... radar waves. If Bounias had been able to reproduce the alterations—whose cause could not otherwise be found—the cat would have been out of the bag, which was not desired at higher levels. Meanwhile, I had suggested that similar waves, modulated into audible frequencies, be directed at rats previously conditioned via Pavlovian methods, to verify (something we now know for certain) that brain organs can be sensitive to such stimuli without any movement of the eardrums. The CNES dismissed our proposals "because, not being part of the institution, we cannot present before the GEPAN Council."
Well, of course...
But the ETCA took note and carried out the experiments. A single, live echo, revealed by Vélasco in a moment of indiscretion and recorded by me during a visit to Toulouse: "The microwave defoliation system works very well..." Meanwhile, Esterle and Zappoli, at the CERT (Toulouse Center for Studies and Research, closely linked to the military, where DERMO is located), carried out the disastrous experiment based on my ideas. The failure—due to a costly accumulation of incompetence by the two—led to the dissolution of GEPAN and the sidelining of both men, on the recommendation of René Pellat (current High Commissioner for Atomic Energy, at the time...