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instructions. ists. L'Humanite, terrestrials. 141 PURPLE JUSTICE An eighteen-year-old boy from a Paris suburb told the country that he was kidnapped by extraterrestrial beings. Apparently the "little green men" who abducted him wish to open an embassy in Paris, and informed the boy that they would phone with further This column was widely reprinted and it appeared in the San Fran- cisco Chronicle of January 11, 1980. In fact, Franck Fontaine had not seen any beings during his whole experience. In particular, there were no little green men, and the part about the embassy in Paris and the forthcoming phone call had been invented out of thin air by the journal- Kevin Cape added that, according to a friend of his who wrote for the whole story was a government plot to distract the people from French economic problems like unemployment. (Cape forgot to point out that L 'Humanite is the major Communist newspa- per in France.) Mr. Cape himself hints that the story might have been engineered to derail media investigation into President Valery Giscard d'Estaing's illegal acceptance of a gift of diamonds by an African dicta- tor, a juicy scandal that titillated the French public at the time. By 1983 Prevost had managed to gather a small group around him, but it never took off as a significant sect. It did operate a private FM station called Radio Korrigan in a little village in Brittany. I visited the farmhouse where the station was installed and found no evidence of significant activity. On the date of the expected contact (August 15, 1983) over a thousand people gathered again in vain in Pontoise to wait for extra- In June 1983 the French translation of my book Messengers of Deception was published in Paris under the title UFOs: The Great Manipulation. In this revised edition I called attention to the potential for exploitation of UFO stories in psychological experiments and I hinted that Purple Justice might be an example of such manipulation. The results were immediate: within days Jean-Pierre Prevost con- fessed that the whole thing was a hoax in an interview with Emile