Page Content (OCR)
STRIP TEASE given. 103 that were in an enclosure nearby and they anesthetized the dogs when they started barking. The document then explains what trouble the aliens had in understanding the precise functions of some of the objects they had stolen and what mistakes they made in the course of their analysis. For example, they had foolishly tried to drill a hole in the glass of the light bulbs. In an effort to put an end to all the speculation about UMMO, French authorities deployed helicopters and even aircraft flying infrared photo-reconnaissance missions over La Javie. They did not succeed in validating any part of the UMMO story. At the same time, a systematic search was made to find out if anybody had filed a complaint for burglary around that time. After much effort—given the size of the archives that had accumulated—the police found a fragment of paper showing that the theft of an electrical meter had indeed been reported by the inhabitants of a house that corresponded to the description In 1974 I traveled to La Javie with two French investigators, Aime Michel and Fernand Lagarde, armed with a drawing of the part of the mountains where an American expert in remote viewing, the late Pat Price, thought that a cave might be located. I drove to the end of the precipitous road, scaring off a herd of goats along the way, and we spoke with local people at a cluster of houses, barely a village, suspended on the edge of the cliff where the path stopped. Unfortunately, they had never heard of any cave in the vicinity. Besides, the geology of the area did not seem to favor the formation of such a cave. The La Javie episode is revealing about the UMMO source, in spite of the contradictions in the story, and perhaps because of these contra- dictions themselves. The author of the document makes use of a little- known fact buried in police archives to blend a measure of reality into its fiction, knowing that investigators who strive to validate the story will eventually discover the actual theft of the electrical meter and will be amazed by it. It is a technique we find in other cases, notably in the notorious Majestic 12 affair; other contemporary hoaxes have used it as well: in that respect the UMMO documents can be likened to the Priory of Sion affair described in the book Holy Blood, Holy Grail.