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thesis, gives a surprising answer to the | FAKED PHOTOGRAPHS? ee why? According to him, this | The sighting in San José de Valderas (1 June 1967) started at about 8 hrs 20 pm diverediting Hfology and making fools ‘ and lasted for 12 minutes. According to Luis Jordan Peria, several witnesses, ufologists through a faked contact. [See his including two photographers with cameras, watched the whole scene. Each article posted at website photographer handed over his film anonymously to the local press. Those http://www. ufocom org; Ed] : famous pictures have been analysed by several teams, including one led by Could such an expensive and complicat- Claude Poher, who was then a CNES executive (CNES is the French National ed program, involving only a group of Centre for Space Studies). It was just before he founded, in 1977, the GEPAN about 30 Spanish contacts, have been put which later became the SEPRA (Study of Unidentified Aerial Phenomena) [see up to get to this point more than 30 years Twilight Zone, NEXUS 6/06; Ed.]. Today, Jean-Jacques Velasco runs this unit in later? Building up such an elaborate plan Toulouse. He recalls his involvement in the analysis: ; over such a long period would maximise "Two major elements allowed us to say the pictures were fake. Using the the risks. And why should anyone aim at original photograph, we conducted a geometric and ‘densitometric’ analysis. holding ufology up to ridicule if it were not | Both show that the object is very close to the camera. With silver-based to hide the fact that UFOs are real? A ven. |@mulsions, the contrast response reveals the object's distance. Secondly, the microscopic analysis down to the grain shows a ‘break’ above the object, a ture like this then appears to be as dispro- . A S ee ans = 0 vertical line that we identified as a nylon thread (supporting ‘two plastic camping portionate as it is hazardous, and unneces- sarily sophisticated. plates stuck together’). Put together, these elements allow to conclude in favour Furthermore, the letters are not particu- of a model." . . . larly pro-American, as Gildas Bourdais It would thus be a crude special effect, as confirmed by other analysis, though notes, but neither are they pro-Soviet. | not all reliable. Poher mentions the thread in interviews, but his report published Never short of arguments, some ufologists | in March 1977 in the Inforespace journal does not mention it. Perhaps the suggested a manipulation from the CIA, _ | analysis took place later. The same year, William Spaulding from Ground Saucer when the letters were hard on the Soviet | Watch in Phoenix (Arizona) analysed the pictures with a computer and claimed system, taken up in turn by the KGB to __| he had detected a thread. A team of Spanish investigators, led by Carles Berche, criticise the United States through the | reached the same conclusion in 1994. Ummites! However, the pictures still have supporters, who claim that Claude Poher, after One can see how this reasoning seems __ | first calling, in Madrid, Rafael Farriols and Antonio Ribera (who had given him scarcely economical and how some would | the pictures) to tell them that the analysis was very positive, subsequently resort to any mental contortion to contrive | published negative results. Manipulation of the original films is suspected. The motivations for what can only be ahuge | negatives are supposedly in possession of the ufologist Juan José Benitez, who hoax. would have "borrowed" them a few years ago. Until his death, Ribera declared Hoax or real fact, each version remains _| that the pictures were genuine. an hypothesis as long as it has not been Benitez called on the services of the Guardia Civil for a new analysis, with the proved. But today, this story has become _| apparent conclusion that the thread is in fact a scratch on the negative... such a puzzle that one might contend one- Another line of thought is to consider that the pictures are indeed a forgery self with pulling a few threads one by one, | intended once again (by the Ummites) to discredit the whole case. In his first hoping to gather a mere body of assump- | book on the subject, Jean-Pierre Petit supports this idea (real-fake pictures) and tions. Bourdais acknowledges, for his part, | an Ummite letter seems to have confirmed this. Indeed, if the pictures are too that this "file" is totally "apart" in ufology. beautiful to be genuine, maybe they are also too beautiful to be false... ATTEMPTS TO DECIPHER THE LANGUAGE Moreover, he says that using this "first level" language they can Recently, a new major element has been brought to the file. communicate through telepathy. The Ummite letters are sprinkled with ideogram-like "words" of Jean Pollion thinks he has revealed the system behind these their own language, for which they give an equivalent in Spanish terms. After many cross-checks and years of work, his hypothesis (e.g., "OYAGAA" for "the Earth"). is that the sound of each letter is meaningful in the term. Thus he A lexicon has thus been established and some inquisitive minds identifies 17 "soundcepts", whose arrangement in a given order have tried to break the code of this language, matching it with lan- produces the signification of the vocable. For example: "A" guages labelled by Europeans as "exotic", such as Chinese, but stands for "truth, action, effectiveness"; "D" stands for "expres- without success. Unsurprisingly, as part of a hoax the language sion, form, appearance"; "E" for "mental image, perception, sen- would have been meaningless. sation, idea", etc. Even if a conceptual shoehorn is sometimes The words appear as sequences of letters from our alphabet, needed to follow Pollion, his model seems fairly functional. It often doubled or tripled within each word, hence hard to pro- allows reconstitution of an elementary language, essentially nounce. descriptive and devoid of "object words" as we use them. The In 2002, under the pen name "Jean Pollion", a scientist pub- Ummites describe their first-degree language as basic and func- lished a book (Ummo: de vrais extraterrestres, Aldane, Cointrin, tional. Higher degrees enable handling fewer "objective" con- Switzerland, 2002) in which he claims he h: ohanld ha cracked the code. It cepts, like scientific or spiritual ones. tad ant that thie Tmmite 2 nounce. In 2002, under the pen name "Jean Pollion", a scientist pub- lished a book (Ummo: de vrais extraterrestres, Aldane, Cointrin, Switzerland, 2002) in which he claims he has cracked the code. It should be pointed out that this Ummite language is supposed be the "first level" in their communication mode, as their science in fact relies on a four-valued logic, whereas we use third-excluded logic, i.e., with two values (every claim is either true or false; see the problems caused by this in quantum physics, for instance). A DIALOGUE ON THEORETICAL PHYSICS Since Jean-Pierre Petit has explored the cosmological side, let us take a look at the highly complex case of elementary particles. However, to avoid stepping into that complexity, it might be NEXUS +59 FEBRUARY — MARCH 2004 www.nexusmagazine.com