UFOs - Leslie Kean [71]
The “Amaranth case” involved an object, drawn by the witness, that hovered near the ground. Vegetation was desiccated, most likely by powerful electromagnetic fields. © temoin, GEIPAN
A psychologist in charge of analyzing the testimony and the psychological profile of the witness concluded in his report that this story had not been invented and that the witness was neither a mythomaniac nor a hoaxer.
Such field investigations demonstrated the possibility of the physical reality of the UAP, but, in fact, the aeronautical cases are the ones which provide the most convincing results on this question. Unlike land witnesses, pilots are operating within the framework of a transportation or air security mission, following the directives coming from civilian or military navigation control centers. They are neutral and highly trained observers when sightings of UAP occur. Such observations of strange unidentified air phenomena by civilian and military pilots in France led to the creation of a database of 150 cases of aeronautical UAP beginning in 1951. The classification into the four categories showed that over 10 percent (fifteen) of the aeronautical UAP cases belong to Type D, the ones that can’t be explained despite precise witness accounts and good-quality evidence. In about half these cases, environmental effects such as electromagnetic interference with on-board instruments and/or disturbances of the radio connection with air traffic controllers were reported by the pilots when UAP were nearby.
In January 1994, SEPRA investigated a case that turned out to be the most exceptional pilot case documented in the French skies. On January 28, Captain Jean-Charles Duboc and copilot Valerie Chauffour were piloting Air France flight 3532, making the Nice-London connection at a speed of 350 knots (approximately 650 kilometers/hour) in the early afternoon. The visibility was excellent when a crew member informed the captain and his copilot about a dark object to the left of the aircraft, which he thought was a weather balloon. It was 13:14 GMT and the sun was at the zenith. At first, Duboc thought it was an aircraft banking at a 45-degree angle, but soon all three agreed that this was not a familiar object. They estimated a distance of twenty-two miles (fifty kilometers) at an altitude of six miles (ten kilometers). At first it looked bell-shaped, and then more like a lens or disc, brown and large, and the witnesses were struck by its changes in shape. After about a minute, it disappeared almost instantaneously, as if suddenly becoming invisible, without any escape trajectory. The duration of this sighting was approximately a minute.
Captain Duboc reported the incident to authorities at the Reims air navigation control center, which had no information about any aircraft in the location. A report was then sent to SEPRA, which classified it as Type C, meaning it was insufficiently documented for identification. However, Reims contacted the Taverny air defense operations center, CODA, and we later learned something important that allowed us to reclassify this event as a clear Type D: CODA recorded a radar track at their control center in Cinq-Mars-la-Pile that corresponded in both location and time to the observation of the crew of Air France flight 3532. The object disappeared from view of the radar scope and