Another BBC UFO article....Why the French state has a team of UFO hunters ..4th Nov 2014 [Archive]

Cidersomerset

4th November 2014, 23:07

This is another BBC article following on the Italian one last week. Its a semi serious
article as this quote from the bottom of the page illustrates....

But there are around 400 UFO sightings going back to the 1970s that the
French team cannot explain. One, an alleged flying saucer landing near Aix-en-
Provence in 1981, they take very seriously - there were landing marks and multiple
witnesses.

Then it immediately asks is it worth spending taxpayers money on this in these
times of austerity ?.......DUH ! This really winds me up.One of the most important
questions ever for humanity is , ARE WE ALONE ?.....and the 'D--k Heads' ask a
question like that...LOL ...They should be demanding an independent official
disclosure channel run thru and paid by the publicly funded state media outlet.
With genuine researchers not Nick Pope and David Clarke the usual suspects
brought out for media debate on the subject .

I'm not sure why the BBC are posting these articles , maybe they want to show
they are contributing to one of the most interesting subjects in the alternate
community even if they are not really committed to disclosure , otherwise they
would have an article from the likes of Richard Dolan or our Bill....LOL

The BBC like the MOD are tied by government policy on these matters and are
unlikely to willingly disclose , but you never know they may not be able to stop it......

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http://static.bbci.co.uk/frameworks/barlesque/2.75.0/desktop/3.5/img/blq-blocks_grey_alpha.png

4 November 2014 Last updated at 00:08

Why the French state has a team of UFO hunters
By Chris Bockman
Toulouse, France

http://news.bbcimg.co.uk/media/images/78661000/jpg/_78661877_ufo-marseille.jpg
An unidentified ring over Marseille

Thousands of UFO sightings are reported every year but not many countries are
willing to spend money investigating them - there is just one dedicated state-run
team left in Europe. Is France onto something?

You don't need a time machine when you visit the French Space Centre
headquarters in Toulouse - it's already a throwback to the 1970s. Green lawns
sweep on to wide boulevards with stout long rectangular office blocks on either side.

It's almost Soviet-style in the heart of southern France. There are few signs of life
even though 1,500 people, most of them civil servants, work in boxy offices along
narrow unappealing corridors.

France has the biggest space agency in Europe - the result of the 1960s space race
and President Charles de Gaulle's grand determination to keep France independent
of the US by building its own satellites, rocket launchers and providing elite space research.

An offshoot of all that - France is the only country in Europe to maintain a full-time
state-run UFO (unidentified flying objects) department. There used to be one in the
UK and another in Denmark but they closed down years ago due to budget cuts.

France's UFO unit consists of four staff, and about a dozen volunteers who get their
expenses paid to go on site and look into reports of strange sightings in the skies.

http://news.bbcimg.co.uk/media/images/78665000/jpg/_78665544_ufo-cigar.jpg

Sketch of a UFO A drawing from the files at the French UFO department
The team is called Geipan. That's a French acronym for Study Group and
Information on Non-Identified Aerospace Phenomenon.

http://news.bbcimg.co.uk/media/images/78666000/jpg/_78666115_ufobloke.jpg
Its boss is Xavier Passot. Surrounded by dozens of books on UFOs, and stacks of
documents, he tells me his mission is to be as transparent as possible about
strange sightings and to follow up on each one that his team receives.

They publish their results on their website which gets 30,000 hits a month. The
team receives, on average, two UFO sightings a day. The department insists an 11-
page form is filled out for each one. The idea is to provide details including
photographs where possible but also weed out jokers and time-wasters.

If someone claims to have seen strange lights in the skies, the UFO team might go
online to see whether the observation took place on a flight path - it can trace
commercial air traffic going back more than a week.

The team also has access to military flight paths and is in touch with the air force
and air traffic controllers.

Sometimes if its staff are really intrigued by photos they have seen or if there have
been several witnesses to the same sighting, they will call the local police to ask
whether they can be considered credible.

They might even check with neighbours to see whether they were out drinking that
night or perhaps smoking something other than cigarettes.

Passot says many of the people who get in touch are smokers, puffing away outside
bars or their own homes at night, gazing at the stars.

One of the boxy offices houses yellowing archives going back to the 1950s. The
papers I look at contain eerie accounts of strange things encountered in the skies
by fighter pilots on routine reconnaissance missions.

http://news.bbcimg.co.uk/media/images/78665000/jpg/_78665543_ufoaucamville.jpg
Sketches of a UFO seen near Aucamville
For what it's worth and for those who suspect there's conspiracy afoot, Passot tells
me he has never covered up a UFO sighting.

I take a look at some amazing photos of strange lights and circular forms caught on
camera. One, taken by a motorist, of a white ring shape above Marseille is
particularly grabbing (the image at the top of this page). But the team figured that
one out - it wasn't invaders from Mars, just the reflection of a small interior
overhead light in the car.

In fact, the department can explain away nearly all these phenomena and, believe
it or not, the most common culprits are Chinese lanterns sent up at night during
parties. The investigators often telephone the local town hall to ask if, perhaps,
there had been a wedding going on at the time.

Balloons and kites floating in the skies also get mistaken for alien craft, and space
debris and falling meteorites giving off strange lights are more common than one
might think.

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l
More from the Magazine

http://news.bbcimg.co.uk/media/images/78666000/jpg/_78666117_players_watching624.jpg

Players pointing up at the sky
Sixty years ago a football match ground to a halt when unidentified flying objects
were spotted above a stadium in Florence. Did aliens come to earth? If not, what were they?

The day UFOs stopped play

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-29342407

http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?76303-The-day-UFOs-stopped-play......Florance-Italy-1954-UFO-Files-of-the-Italian-Air-Force

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But there are around 400 UFO sightings going back to the 1970s that the French
team cannot explain. One, an alleged flying saucer landing near Aix-en-Provence in
1981, they take very seriously - there were landing marks and multiple witnesses.

So are there really little green men? Well, the jury's out on the colour but there are
many working here, as well as others around the world, who are convinced there is
some life out there.

And does the use of French taxpayers' money on UFO research make sense,
particularly in these times of budgetary constraint?

That probably depends on whether you just saw an alien and, in the words of those
Ghostbusters, who you gonna call?

http://news.bbcimg.co.uk/media/images/78665000/jpg/_78665551_ufocentre.jpg

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-29755919

araucaria

5th November 2014, 12:22

Reposted from another thread:

You are right Agape, much of science is consensus politics, which is the downside to peer reviewing, and has two consequences: 1) funding is funneled to agenda-based or pointless research (the sex life of the fruit fly in the context of climate change would win on both counts) and 2) if you research anything else, you are automatically out of the mainstream, and therefore a discredited maverick. Mainstream scientists are often in business with probability rates against chance of one in twenty or less, but discredited mavericks will regularly do as well as that if not considerably better, but owing to their subject matter, nothing is ever deemed proven, although on a level playing field any one such would be considered conclusive or at the very least a valid basis justifying further inquiry.
Here is one example taken from Maurice Chatelain. It involves mathematical evidence drawn from forensic evidence – imprints in the soil of 76 UFO landings – collected by the French police all over France over a 25-day period late in 1954. Many of these sites were along parallel lines exactly 63 km apart, a multiple of 21 cm, the wavelength of hydrogen that is a universal yardstick. One scientist calculated the number of triangles formed between these points (70,300), measured them all and found 1864 isosceles triangles. This is an interesting number because 70,300 divided by 1864 comes to 264/7 or twelve times 22/7, the vulgar fraction value of Pi used by ancient pyramid builders. All the coordinates and figures were checked and validated on a computer by another – skeptical – scientist. In addition, four different samples of 76 random points were checked for the average number of isosceles triangles they produced: each time in the low 1600s: around 250 less.

What happens with examples like this is that they take one so far beyond coincidence that the mind boggles. It is not just one event that is being validated, but a whole concerted array of 76, and the proof of that concertation involves a much larger number of triangles that must have been calculated with considerable skill and precisely positioned with even more skill. This is typical of this type of phenomena. People’s eyes glaze over at the intricacy of all the numbers fitting together, the same as they do when the Great Pyramid is analyzed. For most people demanding proof, they are obviously getting turned off or dazzled out by too much of a good thing.

The only way to bring people round is positive individual experiences comparable to the NDE. It have to be one person at a time since there is probably too much fear of negative technology being used to perform a mass disclosure. And understandably so: we are talking about a population that has been seriously traumatized by unwelcome intrusion.