What is Seen, But Not Spoken Of

Of Dr. X's remarks, it is of course true that the greatest UFO researcher is of France. This same news-letter, the Saucer Smear, reports Jacques Vallee is 'the greatest ufologist ever.' Vallee does not think they are aliens - it would sadly dull if that were the case. Here is an excerpt from an interview with him, about how he became interested in this research:

"My first job was at Paris observatory, tracking satellites. And we started tracking objects that were not satellites, were fairly elusive, and so we decided that we would pay attention to those objects even though they were not on the schedule of normal satellites. And one night we got eleven data points on one of these objects--it was very bright. It was also retrograde. This was at a time when there was no rocket powerful enough to launch a retrograde satellite, a satellite that goes around opposite to the rotation of the earth, where you obviously need to overcome the earth's gravity going the other direction. You have to reach escape velocity in the direction opposite the rotation of the earth, which takes a lot more energy than the direct direction. And the man in charge of the project confiscated the tape and erased it the next morning.

"So that's really what got me interested. Because up to then I thought, Scientists don't seem to be interested in UFOs, astronomers don't report anything unusual in the sky, so there probably isn't anything to it. Effectively, I was in the same position that most scientists are in today--you trust your colleagues, and because you don't see any reports from credible, technical witnesses, you assume that there is nothing. And there I was with a technical report--I don't know what it was. It wasn't a flying saucer--it didn't land close to the observatory. But still, it was a mystery. And instead of looking at the data and preserving the data, we were destroying it."