The Second Negative Law: witness re1iability

A typical Heuyeritis victim would be an unstable, probably single or unhappily married clerk with little or no responsibility, or a college student filled with youthful enthusiasm, or some spiritualist soul in quest of unearthly experiences. Such a person would perhaps go out at night in the hope of ‘seeing the saucers’, and wishful thinking would thus be responsible for many reports. And indeed this is the phenomenon we observe among the noisy crowd of the American ‘contactees’: typically, these persons go out at night, alone, inthe desert or some out-of-the-way spot, led by strange ‘mental impulses’, and they find what they were looking for: contact with beings from other planets. And they hurry back to town to organise a series of lectures, com­plete with slides and tape recordings from Jupiter Area 7. Did the landing reports of 1954 originate from such sources?

They did not. And for the first time, we have the documents to prove it: the sightings reported in the local press give the number of witnesses, their names, addresses and professions, and often their age. Statistics compiled on this basis are impressive.

Population density above 80 per square kilometer
FIGURE 1. The landing sites of 1954 plotted against population density.

In case no. 13 for instance, where a machine ‘the size of a small bus’ was seen to land, the main witnesses were Messrs René Paul, an electrician, and Louis Moll, a policeman. There were two groups of independent witnesses in villages 2 kilometres apart. In Marignane (case no. 1) and Santa Maria Airport (14) the witnesses were guards on duty.

In Le Jou (15) the object was reported by two policemen from Plombieres who were unaware of the sighting made by the Patient family: Mr. Patient is a Post Office Inspector in Bourges, a man with a responsible position.

Case no. 16 is an example of a report made by two women, who saw the craft independently as they walked by the clearing where the machine had landed: widow Geoffroy, 59 years old, was going to wash clothes at the public washing place, and Mile Gisele Fin (16 years of age) came fifteen minutes later, leading her goats to the pasture; these are indeed likely science-fiction addicts!

In Foussignargues (case no. 20), Mme Julien and her son André saw the object come down from the sky. So did all the people in the bus. Their report is quite independent from that of M. and Mme Roche, who saw the object on the ground from their house on the hill.

And the man who went to the police in Wassy (case no. 58) to report he had just seen the pilot of a strange machine, was no bit-and-run contactee: we learn that he is 48 years old, the father of seven children, and has been a roadmender in Wassy for nineteen years.

In the celebrated series of October 14, at nightfall, we have the following situation: four groups of witnesses who have never heard of each other make independent reports to different news­papers. One of the reports, signed by M. Mouillon, an engineer, was published in J’Astronomie and the correlation with the other three sightings was discovered by accident ten years after the observation! Yet the object in question was a reddish disc which flew very low, causing cars to stall and headlights to die. These strange happenings are reported by normal people, who had normal occupations at the time of the sighting, were generally not known, had no interest in flying saucers and were seeking no publicity. When people told Celeste Simonutti (case 30) that he had seen a ‘flying saucer’, they had to explain to him what it was: be is an Italian citizen working in a tiny island off the French Atlantic coast, he speaks French only with great difficulty, and does not read any newspaper. Before September 30, 1954, he bad never heard of ‘saucers’. As for José Aires (case 173) he does not believe in them even now, and maintains that the little people he saw while he was fishing were ordinary devils!

(a) Thus most witnesses are identified by name (71 per cent) and are well known where they live. Most are family men: observations by the whole family, or by the family and its neighbours, are not rare,

(b) The report from the main witness, who describes an object on the ground, is often confirmed by independent wit­nesses, i.e. persons who did not see the first witness and did not know of his observation: eighteen cases (7, 8, 9, 13, 15, 16, 20, 38, 39, 42, 64, 70, 114, 142, 166, 176, 188, 199). In four cases (16, 70, 166, 199) objects which remained on the ground were seen by different persons at intervals of ten to twenty minutes. In most French cases, the police were called immediately, and took statements from the witnesses within an hour of the sighting.

(c) Practically In all cases, the site of the observation was quite familiar to the witness. In twenty-two cases the machine landed literally in his backyard or in the immediate vicinity of his house or property (field, pasture). In no less than seventy-five cases it landed directly on the road or in the immediate vicinity of the road which he used for going to and from work. In fifteen cases it landed where the witnesses (firemen, nightwatchmen, military personnel) were working.

(d) In forty-three cases the witnesses were at work when they saw the object for the first time, in nine cases they were going to work. In twenty-one cases they were returning from work, In twelve cases witnesses were officials (guards, firemen, policemen) on duty: 1, 2, 13, 14, 15, 61, 73, 108, 138, 165, 187, and 189.

(e) Reports are made with equal frequency by persons of both sexes. There is no abnormal frequency of certain age groups. Reports made by children do not differ significantly from reports made by men or women, except in wording as would be expected.

(f) In twenty-one cases the main witness showed signs of extreme terror, and in four cases he fainted either during the experience or immediately afterwards (42, 125, 130, 142). In six cases he had to receive medical attention (26, 130, 149, 188, 194, 196). The reaction of animals is also one of panic in many cases.

(g) Out of a minimum of 624 persons connected with the 200 reported landings only ninety-eight were alone when they observed the object. This figure corresponds to a proportion of 15 per cent. In terms of sightings this means that less than half of the observations (exactly 49 per cent) had only one witness: and this is not surprising when we take into account the time of the observations and their rural character. In thirteen cases (6, 7, 13, 15, 20, 47, 53, 54, 64, 101, 176, 178, 185) there were no more than ten witnesses. In case no. 191, twelve witnesses, in case no. 177 there was a crowd of about 150. (In twenty-five cases there was an unknown number of witnesses, and we assumed an average of two.)

These statistics speak very eloquently in favour of the real character of the reported phenomena. We can summarise them as follows:

‘IN THE 1954 LANDINGS, THE SPECTRUM OF WITNESSES IS TYPICALLY RURAL, WITH A NORMAL PROPORTION OF MEN, WOMEN AND CHILDREN. MOST WITNESSES HELD STEADY JOBS, OFTEN POSITIONS OF SOCIAL

RESPONSIBILITY, AND OBSERVED AN UNUSUAL PHENOMENON WHILE ENGAGED IN THEIR USUAL OCCUPATION AND IN THEIR USUAL ENVIRONMENT.’

This law is further illustrated by the diagram of figure 2, where we have plotted the number of witnesses versus the distance of the object, i.e. the minimum distance between the main witness and the object. Both of these figures are known in sixty-six cases. The filled circles represent observations with physiological effects (‘paralysis’).

It is interesting to observe that the dots are scattered through the diagram with no special pattern: in particular, very close sightings are not necessarily ‘one~witness’ cases. The distribution thus reinforces our conclusion that the ‘stimulus’ is not psychological.

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Figure 2. Distance of object versus number of witnesses,

The First Positive Law

We cannot be satisfied with such a victory, however complete, over the ‘psychological’ theory: we have now established that Heuyer has not explained the reported observations. But neither have we explained them. And the statement that the phenomena were caused by ‘spaceships of some sort’ or ‘extraterrestrial intelligence’ is indeed far too easy a way out! Any person with common sense will find such an idea totally unjustified on the basis of the observations alone, and will demand to see the proof of such a bold conclusion, which raises immediately a number of questions which leave the ‘ufologists’ strangely silent.

Now, if by ‘spaceship’ is meant a machine, and unless it is the product of an intelligenceso totally foreign to mankind as to border on the unobservable, any machine must be engineered according to precise principles of design. And if this is so, it must be possible to test the objectivity of the phenomenon by reference to the reports themselves. In other words: there must exist, in spite of differences in wording, certain invariants in the characteristics of the craft which could not have been faked, and which can be retrieved analytically.

It is true that we could find some comfort, as an American compilation (UFO Evidence) remarks, in the fact that all the objects present a symmetry of revolution, and produce strong electromagnetic effects. But this is not enough: even in the 1954 cases, where witnesses had not been exposed to many descriptions of ‘saucers’, they had nonetheless some idea of Kenneth Arnold’s sighting and the notion of flying discs from Mars was not unknown. At the end of the wave, it had become the most popular idea in Europe. Therefore, neither the shape, nor the maneuverability, nor the physical disturbances in the vicinity of the object, are strong invariants, and the opponents of UFO reality would have no difficulty in throwing such ‘evi­dence’ out of court on psycho-sociological grounds.

Of more interest are the luminous phenomena connected with the objects. It appears that the reported craft can be observed under what we call two ‘phases’; a dark phase, during which they are seen as dull, metallic, sometimes emitting short sparks: then, witnesses speak of ‘machines’, solid bodies, some­times supported by legs and showing luminous openings. And there is a bright phase, which makes the object appear as ‘a fiery sphere’, a globe of fire, whose centre is sometimes seen as a transparent envelope, inside which dark figures are observed. Many witnesses had their attention attracted to these objects because they thought a house was suddenly afire (cases nos. 30, 38, etc.).

It is extremely interesting to study the transitions from the dark phase to the bright phase in connection with the reported manoeuvres of the craft and hypotheses concerningits technology. These are indeed very consistent, and they lead to several strange results; the ‘inside’ of the craft, for instance, is often described as illuminated with an intense light, similar to that of a magnesium flare. The source of the light, we are told, is so powerful that it is able to light up the countryside over an area several kilometres in radius for several hours. Not only is there nothing in our technology which can duplicate this performance in a small volume and in perfect silence, but we would think that the conditions inside such a machine would be quite intolerable for a human being.

But the strongest law will be found in another characteristic of the craft: the diameter of the machine itself. Here we should have a reliable estimate if the object is material, because it was seen on the ground, or very close to the ground, and against a familiar background of buildings and trees. It is much easier to estimate measurements in such circumstances than when the object is a celestial one. Here, we have observations of a motion­less object on the ground. Let us consider all the reports which give both an estimate of the diameter and also the distance from the witnesses: do we obtain a coherent picture?

Indeed we do, and a most remarkable one! On figure 3 we have plotted these reports along with the average of each class. The result is extremely interesting. We find that the estimated diameter of the craft is a constant for all witnesses whose closest approach was between 5 and 200 metres. Witnesses who came very close give a slightly smaller figure, and witnesses very far give a much higher estimate. The latter phenomenon is well-known to psychologists and to astronomers: it is called the ‘Moon Illusion’. If the witnesses were liars, or the victims of a delusion, no such effect would appear. This leads us to our third law:

THE DATA ARE CONSISTENT WITH THE HYPOTHESIS THAT PHENOMENA REPORTED BY THE WITNESSES OF THE 1954 LANDINGS HAD SYMMETRY OF REVOLUTION AND AN ACTUAL DIAMETER OF ABOUT FIVE METRES.

This is, of course, a result of the utmost importance. The esti­mated size of the UFOs which have displayed other types of behaviour (those which did not land) is much larger than 5 metres. Does this mean that the craft in question were specifi­cally designed to come to the ground? How come they are not generally observed in flight? Should we consider with renewed attention those accounts (see case 169 and the Valensole sight­ing) where the craft was said to ‘vanish’ in mid-air?

Too many questions remain unanswered: we need the discovery of many other laws, or technological principles, before we can ascertain the physical nature of these phenomena. But these laws are within reach. Certain elements of the answer have already been found, but are still too fragmentary to be reported here. Besides, the body of good observations is still too small. In eighty cases only do we have a description of the arrival of the object: the other reports in our list involve objects which were already on the ground and generally took off when witnesses came near (this opens, by the way, another avenue for research:

Incidents of the second group show the activity of the UFOs interrupted by human intervention). We need much more detailed reports in order to obtain the scientific datawhich would make such conclusions indisputable.

The Second Positive Law

This scientific investigation appears even more imperative when we discover that not only the objects’ dimension, but other parameters of the phenomenon as well, follow well-defined rules. We will report here on two such patterns. The best established is the Law of the Times, which is illustrated in figure 4. Here we find that only a vanishingly small number of landings take place during the day: the same is not true at all of the sightings of other types. The sudden burst of activity at dusk, and the total disappearance at dawn is thus another characteristic which is specific to the landings. During the night, the reports as we see them decrease in number until about 2 a.m., and become more frequent again at dawn. This is clearly caused by the fact that the number of potential witnesses varies precisely according to this law. Hence the activity of the objects may be a constant throughout the night, while we observe only that portion of it which falls during hours when we are awake. It would be interesting to make the same study on a larger sample of data, to determine whether or not the boundaries of this ‘activity period’ follow the times of sunset and sunrise.

Figure 4. Law of the Times.

Another pattern, which is evident on figure 1, is that of the landing sites. So far, we have only insisted on the avoidance of population centres: there is, as we have said, a large avoidance area which includes six Departments in a diagonal band from Belgium to the Atlantic. North of that zone, there is an area of fairly uniform density along the English Channel from Le Havre to Boulogne, extending about 200 kilometres towards the interior of the land. There is also a very loose distribution of sightings in the south. But the great majority of the landing sites are situated within a diagonal band about 250 kilometres wide, between the lines Metz—Nantes and Bordeaux—Geneva: no less than eighty landings took place in that band, or 51 per cent of the 1954 landings in France. This observation cannot be correlated with any obvious regional characteristic: the band in question stretches from busy Alsace-Lorraine, where most of the sightings were made in dense woods, to the valley of the beautiful and quiet Loire river. It includes wild, sometimes desolate areas of the Vendee and the central plateaux: oddly enough, the density of landings is no higher in those hard-to-reach spots, where people have little or no interest in current events, and. where life is traditionally slow. Certainly nothing could be more out of place than a science-fiction drama in a spot as far removed from modern civilisatlon as the Millevaches plateau. This is the area of France where some of the toughest groups of the Resistance had their inexpugnable entrenchments during the War: and indeed one of the officials who investigated the landings in that area commented that the UFOs seemed to follow a pattern quite similar to that of the ‘Maquisards’, staying in the densest woods and the wildest areas.

The clusters

Another law is noticeable in figure 1: the landings tend to occur in ‘clusters’: two, three or four observations are made by different people at different times within a small, well-defined area a few kilometres wide.

We will report here on two clusters of special interest: the Mezieres cluster and the Saint-Quirin cluster. Of the three observations near Mezieres, none has ever been reported in a national newspaper, nor in a specialised publication. Two come from local papers, the third one is a police report. They were unknown to Aimé Michel and to Carrouges when they wrote

their books. They have received no publicity. The sightings took place on October 4, 16 and 27—roughly twelve days apart. The first case (no. 55) is the report of a child—the object was shaped ‘like a tent’ and an unknown individual was seen nearby. In the second case (130) a woman fainted as she saw a craft land within 30 metres of her. In the third case (165) gendarmes saw a flying object take off at dawn, in the immediate vicinity of the other two sightings.

Same situation in the dense woods of Alsace, near Saint Quirin, Schirmeck and Moussey: six days after the observation of M. Schoubrenner (150) a tractor was stopped as an object flew over at low altitude and the next day (167) a boy and a school director saw a craft on the ground, which left traces forming a triangle.

This pattern of ‘multiple sampling’ is observed in many other cases, in the northern regions, in Brittany, also near Toulouse and Perpignan, but mainly inside the diagonal band which we have indicated earlier. Indeed, this is a very general phenomenon: this recurrent property of the type-I sightings is not, from the data we have, a sociological artefact, but the indication of meaning behind the activity of the objects.

The operators

Out of 200 landings considered here, 156 took place in France and 133 of these involved objects which actually stopped in flight. One hundred and eighteen landed on the ground (while others remained at very low altitude) and were observable in that situation for an appreciable duration which is sometimes expressed in seconds, sometimes in hours. Out of these 118 cases, forty-two involved descriptions of the ‘pilots’ of the craft—the operators.

In five cases, they were described inside the craft (nos. 79, 116, 124, 133, 137), and this leaves thirty-seven cases of opera­tors seen outside the object, of which twenty-three gave detailed descriptions. If we turn to the world-wide picture, we find eighteen similarly detailed reports of ‘entities’.

A first remark comes to mind immediately when we review these cases: the descriptions always involve beings which are near-human in appearance, sometimes absolutely human (see cases nos. 8, 16, 35, 52, 63, 161, 173, 175, 180, 192 for opera­tors of average or above-average height and human features, and see no. 144 for a report of a human operator seen in the company of two ‘humanoids’). These human operators are always said to be ‘of European type’ with few variations, and they are never described as wearing respiratory devices.

In the opinion of many, this constitutes a setback to the theory of the ‘extraterrestrial’ origin of UFOs as it is usually stated. Beings from other planets—in the imagination of the most popular writers of fiction—are seldom of human form. When H. G. Wells or Brian Adliss think of ‘Martians’ they do not see them as humanoids. The human body, biology teaches, is typical of this planet. It is characteristic of its gravity, of the pressure and chemical composition of its atmosphere and of its oceans, of its distance from the sun.

Not only the human operators, but some of the humanoids as well, are described as air-breathing creatures. In at least eight in­stances (nos. 57, 58, 80, 105, 113, 156, 188, 194) they have been described as dwarfs whose faces and bodies were covered with an abundant dark hair. None of these entitles was said to wear a respiratory device. We do find descriptions of ‘diving suits’— but they are reserved to the second category of entities, dressed in suits which are alternately compared to ‘armours’, ‘glowing suits’, or ‘shiny coveralls’. ‘It was a small creature,’ said Mine Leboeuf, ‘with a normal human face, from 1 metre to 1.20 metres tall; he was wearing a transparent suit which covered him completely: he reminded me of a child who would have been wrapped in a cellophane bag’ (case no. 19).

It is a fascinating aspect of the study of these phenomena that no theory of their origin and nature can be constructed without reference to theories of the origin of man and the nature of life. It would be presumptuous indeed to claim that we have enough data to add to the body of existing knowledge on these subjects. But the facts must be recorded—they may be only interesting bits of folklore—or they may involve the future development of civilisation. At least, we can say this much: the witnesses are not insane people. They are perfectly normal, simple men and women who did not choose to play a role in this mystery. They are not inclined to prophecy, and they returned to anonymity after telling their stories. Should we take their strange silence as proof of delusion, or as a sign that their minds have closed themselves to an awareness which came too early.

9. 200 Separate Cases (Valle) Part 3 | Contents