UFOs - Leslie Kean [62]
I believe that a demand for the release of yet more files—even in the United States—is no longer a useful focus. It’s an interesting sidetrack, but it does not speak to the heart of the problem. Undue emphasis on seeking further release of documents could even prolong the international stalemate we now face, and give governments a way out through claims that they have done their part by declassifying files or will be doing so in the near future.
Yet the public continues to get very excited about seeing new batches of government documents about UFOs. Most recently, the release of large archives by France in 2007 and the UK in 2008, 2009, and 2010 generated a frenzy of international media coverage in America. So many people logged on to the French website its first day that it crashed. Most interesting was the announcement that about 28 percent of the French cases remain unexplained—approximately the same percentage found by Project Blue Book and the Condon report in 1968.4
A featured 2008 piece in the New York Times by a staff reporter stationed in the UK selectively focused on a few of the silliest new documents released by the British MoD (letters written to the agency by wacky everyday people), and provided readers with the standard ridicule and blatantly biased approach traditionally employed by that noted paper.5 Ironically, this led to the media breakthrough I had been waiting for: The New York Times published the first serious op-ed piece about UFOs in the paper’s history. “Unidentified Flying Threats” by former UK Ministry of Defence official Nick Pope6 offered a rational response to that initial, essentially dishonest story. But once again, none of this publicity changed the political landscape in America regarding UFOs, or did much of anything really, except to make the point that UFOs must be taken seriously.
Unfortunately, we have no way of knowing whether more revealing documents remain closeted away by some governments in secure locations. We know even less about what remains classified in the United States, the most important one of all, and it’s highly unlikely that these documents will be provided anytime soon. If a government agency does not wish to release certain sensitive material through the Freedom of Information Act, it won’t. So in seeking a new emphasis while attempting to inform and persuade American officials to reevaluate the UFO issue, we can begin by learning from the other countries with established government agencies of their own, and finding out what has been gained from these endeavors. How were these agencies set up, and why? How does their work contrast with that of Project Blue Book? What have they learned about UFOs? What actions have they taken as a result?
First and foremost, we turn to France. Exclusive pieces by General Denis Letty, chair of the COMETA group, and Jean-Jacques Velasco, head of the French government agency for over twenty years, explore these questions. Another noted expert from France, Yves Sillard, is one of the most prominent proponents of cooperative international UFO research in the world. Former director general of the French national space center, CNES, Sillard is currently chairman of the steering committee for GEIPAN. In 1977, while head of CNES, he founded the original French scientific committee charged with the investigation of UFO reports—GEPAN, then with a different name. Sillard has served in many important government and research positions between then and his recent return to GEIPAN. In 1998, NATO appointed him assistant secretary general for scientific and environmental