UFOs - Leslie Kean [65]
I first became aware2 of UFOs in 1965 as a captain in the 3rd staff headquarters of the Tactical Air Force (FATAC) in the city of Metz, when I received all the reports submitted by the national police in the territory of the 1st Area. Some were disconcerting. Since there was no perceptible threat, we simply filed them away. At first I was only a bit taken aback, but then competent pilots I knew personally gradually admitted having been confronted by these phenomena.
One was Hervé Giraud, now a colonel, who in 1977 was flying a Mirage IV with his navigator at about 32,000 feet after dark. They saw an extremely bright light approaching on a collision course, heading straight for them. Giraud radioed military air traffic control, which had no radar track on his scope. He had to bank to the right to avoid the object and then tried to keep in visual contact with it. It moved away, and then either it came back or something identical arrived. Giraud felt as if he was being watched at this point, defenseless, and both men were upset, while the pilot had to maneuver into another tight bank. Still, there was nothing picked up on radar. They returned safely to the base at Luxeuil.
Captain Giraud reported that he perceived that the object was solid and immense, comparing it to running into an eighteen-wheeler at night with all the lights on. It didn’t emit any light beams, but glowed with a steady, brilliant white light that obscured any shape behind the illumination.
Two points about this really impressed me. Nothing other than a combat aircraft could perform with the speed and maneuverability of this object. But if it were a combat jet, it would have been registered on radar, especially at that low altitude. In fact, no traffic was picked up by the air traffic controllers anywhere in the area of the Mirage IV. Second, the speed of the object during both encounters was so high during a sharp turn that it would have been supersonic. This means that if it were a combat plane, it would have made a loud sonic boom that would be heard on the ground and in the surrounding area, especially while things were quiet at night. No sound was heard anywhere.
There were other cases involving pilots flying Mirage fighter jets and in-training aircraft. But one more account in particular left its mark on me. In 1979 I learned that Air Force Captain Jean-Pierre Fartek, then a Mirage III pilot, had seen a UFO. It was most unusual, because this was not while he was flying, but had taken place at his home in a village near Dijon, during the day. The object was very low to the ground, at close range. I wanted to meet him to discuss this, and I arranged to do so three months later on the Strasbourg base. On another occasion, I went to his home and visited his wife, as well, who also saw the UFO.
He told me that on December 9, 1979, at around 9:15 a.m., his wife was coming down the stairs to prepare breakfast when she saw a strange disc-shaped object through the window. She called for Fartek to come and look. The object was hovering low to the ground, in front of a row of apple trees, branches of which could be seen behind it; because of that, the captain could measure the distance of about 250 meters (820 feet) from their house. It was approximately 20 meters (65 feet) in diameter and 7 meters thick. The weather was clear, with excellent visibility. I still have the notes that I wrote during the meeting in the presence of Captain and Mrs. Fartek, which say:
The object looked like two reversed saucers pressed against each other, with a precise contour, a gray metal color on the top and dark blue below, with no lights or portholes.
It was about three meters from the ground, not stabilized, and then rose to the level of the trees, while continuously oscillating, then went down again slightly and stopped. It went up a little once again, always while oscillating; it tilted and accelerated quickly to reach a speed much higher than that of a Mirage III, and disappeared.
Captain Fartek and