UFOs: The Lost Battle
April 14, 2005
Since yesterday, two new changes have been made to my website. I have deleted many pages from my site, which will now display only the following message:
Page deleted on April 13, 2005
Last year, the LEN Law—or “Digital Economy Law”—was passed, amid near-total indifference, particularly among print and broadcast media. Why? Because information disseminated online constitutes competition for these media, which are deeply subservient to financial and political power. This law seeks to muzzle—or attempts to muzzle—a web-based press, and one should not expect such a press to be defended by those who are already silenced.
The LEN Law compels website administrators to self-censor, and they do so. I have done the same. There is no alternative when faced with a new legal arsenal that allows a judge to order the closure of a website under the pretext that its publication “disturbs public order” or “is likely to incite disorder.” Indeed, France is the only country in the world to have imposed such a law, aside from… the People’s Republic of China.
Those who wish to continue speaking, warning others, and “playing the role of the Capitol’s geese” must therefore maneuver carefully to avoid the abrupt closure of their site without prior notice. Precedents already exist.
The pitfalls are numerous. A few months ago, I received two attachments from a “mysterious correspondent,” protected by a pseudonym: + + + +, + + + @wanadoo.fr (not bad, in its way), consisting of two previously unpublished photographs showing the spread of the radioactive cloud during the failed nuclear test at In Ecker in the Sahara, at the beginning of the 1960s. These documents supplemented an existing file I had compiled on this extraordinary blunder committed by the French military, who sought to imitate their “American colleagues.” In short, the French learned that the Americans had shifted their nuclear testing underground. They followed suit by digging a spiral tunnel into a mountain deemed “as solid as possible”—granite. The immense pressure generated by the nuclear explosion overcame the designed “containment” of the French military engineers: the metal-and-concrete plug blew off, and a massive cloud enveloped the mountain, exposing numerous witnesses—including two ministers. Mesmer revealed this incident in an interview twenty years ago. Another minister present, Gaston Palewski, also exposed to radioactive substances, developed cancer shortly thereafter and died from it (as did many others, visible in the photographs, standing exposed, watching the cloud approach them). The error lay in attempting to confine these gases “forcefully within rigid structures.” The Americans, from the outset, understood that tests should be conducted in “loose” terrain, but at sufficient depth. By detonating the charge at a depth increasing with the size of the device (in their Nevada Test Site), a cavity forms, whose size depends on the yield. The energy is absorbed “inelastically” by the overlying limestone layer. It is somewhat as if, testing a grenade, you wished to contain the explosion’s debris by placing the explosive beneath many overlapping layers of sandbags, which would absorb the shockwave generated upon detonation. Indeed, underground nuclear tests cause the ground to rise—sometimes spectacularly for very high-yield devices. For example, Soviet tests on Novaya Zemlya caused uplifts reaching one hundred meters. This uplift absorbs the energy. In hard rock, fissuring would occur, releasing highly radioactive gases.
The failed In Ecker test belongs to history, as does torture during the Algerian War. Forty years later, it is finally being discussed. The corpses have resurfaced. Nevertheless, suppose these two photographs of the failed test had remained all this time in a ministry file stamped “defense confidential.” Who sent them to me? How did they gain access to them?
Of course, forty years later, this no longer matters much. All these facts are known, and the release of these two photographs would not change anything. But suppose this is a maneuver. Then the Ministry of Defense could simply seize the courts, presenting these two documents “classified defense secret since 1961.” The court would immediately shut down the site, invoking the clause “...for the preservation of public order and national defense needs” (exact wording cited). Inevitable.
Thus, rapid reflection was required, and these photographs had to be removed. You will find the HTML page referring to the In Ecker test at the following address:
http://www.jp-petit.com/Divers/Nucleaire_souterrain/in_ecker.htm
You will see that the photographs have disappeared.
However, “cleaning up” a site exceeding 500 megabytes is no simple task. One would have to reread everything—or have it reread very carefully by a lawyer. Even then, a single overlooked point could suffice to trigger site closure. It is not enough to break hyperlinks, as done in the above example. If the documents remain publicly accessible—and verifiable by bailiff—then the offense persists. This was the case until yesterday. Fortunately, a reader alerted me. By accessing:
http://www.jp-petit.com/Divers/Nucleaire_souterrain/dessins/in-ecker1.jpg
and
http://www.jp-petit.com/Divers/Nucleaire_souterrain/dessins/in-ecker2.jpg
one could still access these photographs. I promptly deleted them—not only remotely, but also locally, on my own hard drive. Remote access allows for raids, and merely possessing such photographs—classified as “national defense secrets”—constitutes an offense liable to result in site closure and confiscation of equipment.
The fact that these two drawings remained in a forgotten file was pointed out to me by a reader. I have… a few “guardian angels,” fortunately for me.
But why delete so many HTML pages from the site? In such cases, it is better to err on the side of excess. In any case, this is no longer of much importance, as the battle is definitively lost on this front.
What would be the risk? The LEN Law offers every possibility, exploiting the defamatory nature of certain texts. A formal lawsuit or even a formal complaint is not even necessary. It suffices for an individual mentioned in a text to send a simple letter stating, “in this passage, I consider myself defamed.” The site is then immediately ordered closed, provisionally, without requiring judicial review. Those familiar with the intricacies of this law know that arrangements have been made so that online publications do not benefit from the three-month statute of limitations applicable to print and broadcast media (a defamed person has three months to “constitute themselves” as a plaintiff; otherwise, their complaint is inadmissible).
What constitutes defamation? Here we return to the UFO file. A few years ago, the head of a department dedicated to UFO research was cited in a tiny UFOlogy journal, printed in absurdly few copies. The obscure ufologist—also an RM-ist (Rationalist Movement adherent)—referred to him as a “charlatan.” And he was absolutely right. In presenting his analysis of an observation case (note the vagueness of the text) involving numerous witnesses, he had simply demonstrated his incompetence, and years later, the ufologist produced irrefutable evidence of this incompetence. Yet, legally speaking, he had committed an error. One may write, without risking a lawsuit, “Mr. X’s work is nonsense.” But writing “Mr. X is a charlatan” is ample grounds for a defamation lawsuit, with claims for damages.
This is precisely what happened—and it was done thoroughly. The ufologist was condemned, both at first instance and on appeal, to a severe penalty. The plaintiff, head of the department, had his bank accounts seized. Had he owned any real estate, it would have been sold to satisfy the judgment.
It was… staggering.
This demonstrates the lengths to which the political-military establishment is willing to go to conceal from the public how the UFO file was managed in France over 30 years. Every effort was made to hide from the public the few pieces of information gathered by gendarmes, decreed the sole on-site investigators (bound by national defense secrecy), who were authorized to conduct investigations. Once collected, this information, these documents, these elements were entrusted to completely incompetent individuals—usually non-scientists or those with utterly insufficient scientific knowledge. This, through this disproportionate trial, is what they sought to conceal. In vain, thanks to the Internet. I immediately published the official report of the seizure of the RM-ist’s accounts. A “Telethon” was quickly organized, raising the funds necessary to pay the enormous fine (considering the “offense” and the defendant’s financial situation). At the time of the trial’s launch, ufologists associated with the defendant were warned by phone:
- If any one of you moves, if you even dare to testify, there will be consequences for you as well.
The affair remained confined to the web, and the press made no mention of it. Nevertheless, it proved sufficient to trigger the closure of the government-run office. It is said that the overseeing agency is now seeking to form “a group of scientists to examine the UFO file.” Another farce—nothing more. After thirty years, one more farce is no longer significant.
Up to April 13, 2005, my site still contained numerous documents demonstrating, exposing, etc.
Meanwhile, there had been the conference I attended in England in January 2001, resulting in my book UFOs and American Secret Weapons, published in 2003 by Albin Michel. I returned from this conference deeply shaken. I learned from a group of Americans (one of whom, we later discovered, held a senior position at the Carlyle Group!) the following:
*- That the Americans had indeed recovered wreckage in 1947
- That they were immediately convinced, at the highest levels, that the UFO phenomenon corresponded to extraterrestrial incursions
- That they implemented a global disinformation campaign, affecting virtually all countries (except perhaps the Russians, who may have had their own assessments)
- Having grasped the link between certain aspects of the UFO phenomenon and MHD (magnetohydrodynamics), they achieved the remarkable feat (deliberately allowing civil applications of the discipline to decline in their country) of convincing numerous countries—including all European nations—that this vast field held no interest
- In parallel, they pursued ultra-secret research through所谓 “black programs,” exclusively military in nature.*
Some succeeded—for instance, in nanotechnology. Americans love winks. It is no coincidence that the company manufacturing the RFID chips planned for April 2005 to be embedded in 500,000 Gillette razorswas named:
January 2001 was a real shock for me. I realized—and this holds true worldwide—that governments’ sole motivation, when they show any interest in the UFO topic, is the dream of extracting from it new weapons, or means to better stupefy and control populations. In fact, all technology and science on Earth have, for decades, served the basest projects, utterly divorced from humanism. I never imagined things could go this far—and this applies equally, on a smaller scale, to my own country, France. Through front organizations serving as façades and information-gathering structures, the military has spent 30 years trying to recover some “exotic” knowledge they can apply in the “defense” domain—a term covering planetary madness and a staggering distortion of our science and technology in favor of military-industrial lobbies.
In short, it was doomed from the start. Thirty years behind, Europeans (and the French) today realize that among the “spin-offs” of the UFO file was MHD. But thirty years cannot be recovered. The Americans, however, understood in 1947!
Incidentally, I wish readers would stop sending me messages urging me to “restart French MHD research.” This is undesirable, as such activities would be exclusively oriented toward developing new weapons. And I find that, in this area, we already devote a sufficiently large portion of our efforts without adding more. In any case, I categorically exclude any collaboration on such projects, given this context.
I rediscovered a surviving photo of the complete destruction of all the MHD files I had compiled. After my abandonment by K.O. in 1986, I had thrown everything into the trash. This photograph escaped the purge, having remained stuck between the pages of a book:
MHD in the 1980s, elsewhere than in France. Note the size of the seats in the cockpit.
What is extraordinary is to catalog the disinformation operations carried out by the Americans—for instance, the Pocantico conference, where the retired plasma physicist Peter Sturrock (fully aware of the “truth about things” in his country), before a credulous European audience, expressed the wish “that scientists finally decide to take an interest in the UFO topic.” What a laugh! What a con job! I was told that Mrs. Galbraith (wife of a former U.S. ambassador to France, closely linked to the Rockefeller family) was about to publish or had just published a new book summarizing her initial inventory of available material for UFO study—and people swallowed it, hook, line, and sinker.
In fact, the only pebble in this ocean of disinformation was yours truly, the only one relentlessly publishing scientific papers—albeit in vain—to alert the scientific community to the reality of the UFO issue. On this front, the failure is total after thirty years of senseless efforts, even though this flood of publications led some individuals to question things and inspired many students to dream. As mentioned above, the brilliant policy implemented by “public authorities” has now lost two of its main architects: one died in 2005, the other the previous year. One was a minister; the other held the highest-level position in nuclear energy. Moreover, add the resignation, stupidity, and utter cowardice of members of the international scientific community. Do not expect a scientist to risk his life. Should he risk his career, he would already collapse entirely. I believe I now hold a certain contempt for this unimpressive lot. Aragos and Lichnowowskys have disappeared, replaced by “entrepreneurs in science,” intellectual speculators, careerists. I knew a man, a scientist, who took risks by revealing what he had discovered in the early 1980s: the phenomenon of nuclear winter. Today, it has become common knowledge, widely publicized, even featured in films. But at the time Vladimir published his work, these ideas disturbed the military-industrial lobby. He was assassinated in Madrid, and his body was never found. I believe that, aside from me, no one remembers his name, which I have mentioned in several of my books.
For one Alexandrov, how many legions of cowards?
Cowards—or simply narrow-minded individuals, too preoccupied with their small careers and personal interests, too constrained by their fears to look beyond the tip of their noses. In one book, I had described our scientists as “timid monks.”
They are not the only ones. Others, fortunately among the brightest, have long sold their souls and now work, equipped with powerful resources and generously paid, albeit bound by the strictest secrecy, in military sanctuaries to which even politicians… do not have access.
What remains on the French scene? Nothing—or ufologists, which amounts to the same thing. They are the bandar-log of UFOs, occupying the abandoned citadel and wasting time in vain debates. Anything and everything is found there, including fantastic mythomaniacs. But I will not trouble myself revisiting such a tedious subject.
There are media figures there, fingers on the seam of their trousers, seated on ejectable seats, saying only what they are told to say, lest their “frequency range” be instantly cut.
There are “honorable correspondents,” linked to intelligence services. One of them published a book. You will easily guess which one I mean. His name appears as an advisor in a project for a theme park dedicated to… espionage, Spyland. In fact, do not bother searching for the page referring to it—I removed it from my site. Not out of fear of reprisals, but out of fatigue. If the French accept their money being spent on such a theme park, planned near Valence, frankly, that is their problem, no longer mine.
The “honorable correspondents” infiltrate as best they can, using their four available neurons. One, assisted by a vain third-degree practitioner, seized without resistance a vast and fascinating file, which has become… an empty fortress.
All this is tiresome and boring. Yet, in truth, it would be nothing if this immersion in the UFO file had not, brutally, forced us to confront our own terrestrial destiny. As Swiss Ziegler notes in his recent book The Empire of Shame, in a few years (he estimates five), everything on our planet has begun to unravel. The poor grow poorer, the rich (everything is relative) increasingly numerous and glutted. International Law is dying. This is perhaps the most important sentence in a book that is a staggering account of current deviations.
The author, UN rapporteur on food issues (one might call him a “secretary for famine”), concludes his book without suggesting anything. In his epilogue, one senses he believes an event comparable to the 1789 Revolution—which fascinates him—would be welcome. Yet what he forgets—or does not know—is that such an event, a bourgeois revolution, is no longer even conceivable. Media-induced stupefaction, the future “chipping” of human beings, their manipulation, and the enormous coercive means now available make the barricade no longer even a viable solution. Soon, Zorglonde will rule the world. Reality surpasses fiction.
When closing Ziegler’s book, one wonders: “Then, what remains for the despairing of the Earth?”
We live on a planet that is worsening in every way, increasingly so, and incapable of pointing its youth toward any path. It is shocking to see Bush and his entourage claiming Christianity while the Gospels clearly state, “No one can serve both God and Mammon” (Mammon meaning money). Elsewhere, mullahs exploit their youth’s disgust for life by sending them to blow themselves up (randomly selected youths, not their own sons). In Benares, thousands of widows simply starve to death, amid general indifference, in a system that offers its own ready-made answer:
- It must be your karma. But do not worry: in your next reincarnation, things will surely improve. As for us, it is normal that we have pleasant lives—we have always been kind, haven’t we…?
The last refuge of humanity, of the despairing, is a land called:
Absurdistan
Our world, to quote Ziegler, “is refeudalizing,” becoming ubuesque. Ubu casts his shadow over the entire Earth, wielding “his shit-crook and his finance-stick,” declaring, “I shall kill everyone, and then I shall go.”
I do not know if you have read Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles. It is a series of chapters where the author, through the metaphor of “the conquest of Mars,” addresses profoundly human themes. At one point, Black residents of a U.S. region decide to build their own rocket to leave Earth and seek their fortune elsewhere. A young Black waiter timidly informs his white employer he is leaving. The latter, stunned, watches with his friends as the rocket carrying all the bar waiters and shoeshiners lifts off into the blue, leaving behind a heterogeneous crowd.
All this suggests an idea. Ultimately, the “fuck-ups”—the poor—have become so impoverished they are no longer consumers. Robotics and artificial intelligence are flourishing. Our cars are already manufactured by robots. Extrapolating, all terrestrial industrial activity could be entrusted to machines endowed with a rudimentary artificial intelligence. Consider, for example, Gillette’s recent attempt to embed RFID chips in its razors, “to improve inventory management.” Consumer associations in the U.S. have temporarily forced the company to delay the project, but it was indeed a trial. Beyond this, every supermarket product could be tracked using these “remotely interrogatable labels” (Radio Frequency Identification Devices). Today, what is a supermarket cashier? A poor woman living under fluorescent lights, never seeing daylight, passing thousands of items daily before a barcode scanner. With RFID, this reading could be done remotely, inside the cart. The customer would enter a bay, the machine would detect the cart’s contents, and a monotonous synthetic voice would say:
- Please insert your credit card in the slot, or, if you have an implant, confirm your purchase by simply saying “yes.”
Bradbury’s world is not so distant, after all. A cohort of cashiers will swell the ranks of the newly unemployed. As with the widespread adoption of barcode scanners, such changes could occur very rapidly. Technically, everything is ready.
The final problem, ultimately, concerns the mechanics of our economy. Are customers, in the end, truly necessary for an economy to function, just as commercial transactions are? Why not imagine a world populated solely by the very wealthy, surrounded by docile robots, with a few extremely wealthy scientists entertaining themselves by inventing new robots?
The solution is clear: we must rid ourselves of this dead weight of today’s world—the poor, who have become too impoverished to be consumers. Modern science makes this possible. It is morally somewhat awkward, but that is all—someone must be thinking about this.
If we choose to remain within the bounds of morality, then we must invent a new societal model—and we must do so quickly. The tensions in this world are escalating so rapidly that catastrophe looms within a timeframe I estimate at less than ten years. Many find it hard to believe this could be so soon. Some dream of a “rebalancing” of forces and economies among ethnic groups. Yet I fear this belief in an imminent “equilibrium,” in a new “stage,” is merely a dream. We resemble passengers on a bus hurtling down a mountain road, accelerating continuously, its brakes having failed, saying to themselves, “we’ll surely stop somewhere eventually.”
In one sense, yes—but the contemporary question is:
Can we reach the shores of wisdom without paying for this journey with billions of deaths?
The UFO file brings us back to Earth, brutally. In a sense, it forces us to question humanity’s role in the cosmos, of which we believe it was created entirely for our pleasure. This is the famous “anthropic principle,” dear to Brandon Carter. According to this principle, the cosmos has been arranged, physical constants dimensioned solely to allow the emergence of this jewel of the universe: the human being.
What is extraordinary is that our brightest minds, our cosmophilosophers, like Baron Carter, exhaust their imagination precisely when they could simply consider that more perfected creatures than themselves—and us—might exist. But why should humanity be the endpoint of an evolutionary pyramid? Why could it not be merely one link in an evolutionary process eager to continue?
Might we not be like turbulent monkeys, having become dangerously self-destructive and destructive to our environment, mistaking