UFOs - Leslie Kean [61]
In South America, Chile and Peru set up new government agencies tasked with studying UFO cases in 1997 and 2001, respectively. The Brazilian military has conducted UFO investigations since the late 1940s. Russian cosmonauts, scientists, and high-ranking military officials have spoken publicly about UFO events there. And for the first time, the Mexican Defense Department provided data on an unsolved sighting by an Air Force crew to a civilian researcher in 2004, an important step in government openness within that country.
The French government is generally recognized for maintaining the most productive, scientific, and systematic government investigation of UFOs in the world, continuing without interruption for over thirty years. The agency, now called GEIPAN2 (Group for the Study and Information on Unidentified Aerospace Phenomena), is part of the French national space agency known as CNES,3 the French equivalent of our NASA, and serves as a model for other nations that have consulted with it over the years. Particularly remarkable is the network of scientists, police officials, and other specialists that are linked to GEIPAN, ready at a moment’s notice to assist with the investigation of any UFO case. Its purpose has always been purely as a research agency, not primarily concerned with defense issues as was the MoD in England or with aviation safety like Chile. It was set up seven years after the close of Project Blue Book, and states its mission as simply to investigate “unidentified aerospace phenomena” and make its findings available to the public.
Jean-Jacques Velasco of France, Nick Pope of the UK, and General Ricardo Bermúdez of Chile have all headed small government agencies within their own countries that worked full-time on investigating UFO cases. They, among others writing in the pages that follow, describe their innovative work on behalf of their governments, and the impact such close-up work with the UFO phenomenon has had on their lives. In countries around the world, witnesses and investigators such as these are very aware of the need for greater participation by the United States, and are now coming together to address that problem.
Whether they have set up specific offices for UFO investigation or not, many governments have accumulated massive amounts of UFO case documentation over the decades and the public has placed great emphasis on gaining the release of these official files.
In recent years, as if part of a trend toward greater transparency, unprecedented numbers of these documents have been declassified and made public for the first time. Since 2004, the governments of Brazil, Chile, France, Mexico, Russia, Uruguay, Peru, Ireland, Australia, Canada, and the United Kingdom have released once-secret files, and in 2009 even Denmark and Sweden joined the trend by releasing over 15,000 files each. However, none of these new records have changed our overall understanding of the phenomenon, beyond confirming that the same events occur around the world and that the behavior of the objects, and often of the governments responding to them, has been repeated over and over. Unfortunately, there has been little forward motion in terms of actually solving the mystery, and the acquisition of even more documents is not the answer.
In fact, government investigators have by and large been limited by the fact that all they’ve been able to do so far is learn as much as possible after a single event is over. Without greater resources, not much can be done except for the filing of reports, year after year. Letters from civilians about isolated, often questionable sightings are also added to the aggregate,