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normal. sage. He organized a publishing house that soon accumulated debts of $50,000. At that point Prevost left the Midi and moved to Brittany. In trate." 142 REVELATIONS Bouchon, president of a research group called AURIAE. He refused to say if the case was a prank that took unexpected proportions, if he had tried to start a new religion, or simply if he aimed at making money. The entire French press picked up these confessions, and the public became secure in the knowledge that everything had now returned to Following Prevost's confessions, the ufologists naturally dropped the case like a hot potato, ashamed that they had ever been associated with it, and assuming that it was indeed a hoax. What else could it be? Jimmy Guieu's book disappeared from the shelves. Yet in an article published in NOSTRA (No. 587, September 8, 1983) he rejected Prevost's con- fessions. Several other investigations by his group involved contactees who had received messages from Haurrio, the same extraterrestrial who had spoken to Prevost, he said. And Guieu attacked Prevost's credibil- ity. He pointed out that Prevost had dropped his former friends and had gone on to organize a small group of young people to spread his mes- spite of this behavior, Jimmy Guieu still believed that the contact with Haurrio had really taken place. The Purple Justice case provides a magnificent opportunity to see the UFO myth in action through various levels of society: each segment has read into it what it expected, according to its own prejudices, its own tools, and its own skills. The police immediately saw in the three witnesses a group of social misfits and handled them accordingly. They were marginal elements, small-time crooks and leftists. From the beginning they treated them like criminals, using every trick in the book to try to get them to confess, even threatening them with charges of "contempt toward a magis- French science, in the form of GEPAN, pondered the problem as seriously as it could, but it stumbled on the witnesses' lack of coopera- tion. When I discussed the case with Dr. Alain Esterle as he visited my home in San Francisco, he struck me as a very skilled, honest, and sincere scientist, dedicated to advancing knowledge in the fields with