Note: at last, 3 years after my first rant on the matter, in March 2007, the CNES website offered a first batch of documents. While the list underneath is my own list started before the 2007 publication amd will still be updated with material, I am going to review the documents released by the GEIPAN at the CNES as of 2007 here.
You need to hear this (in French, so get a translator if you do not understand french).
I asked french ufologists to think about the following. (Bolded parts are of mine.)
Newspaper La Dépêche du Midi, June 8, 2004::
"The whole of these facts, explained or not, stays from now on among the Sepra files that the ufomaniacs hope to consult as soon as possible since officially, the service does not exist anymore."
I'm the ufomaniac, and they are the ufomaniacs too: http://www.ovniland.com/article.php3?id_article=1.
Thierry Pinvidic signed the above petition and commented:
"I worked with the GEPAN and I had the opportunity to consult scientific documents which were not, contrary to the technical notes, handed out to the public. Among these very interesting documents were the annual reports of the scientific panel of GEPAN. That literature alone would deserve not to be destroyed. But as a vice-president of the SCEAU, and incidentally a poor idiot taxpayer, I wish that ALL is preserved and placed in a structure with a conservatory missions.... I got information in connection with these annual reports of the scientific council of the GEPAN: there are 5 or 6 volumes, adding up approximately 500 pages each. That is, overall 2500 to 3000 pages!"
Claude Poher explains in connection with a case into which he inquired when he was the head of GEPAN (http://www.premiumwanadoo.com/universons/ovni_gbFr/cussac_fr.html):
"Thus, my objective here is really "to help our contemporaries to make their opinion by themselves on the facts of Cussac". Because I thinks that the stake is important. It indeed seems to me that I have some reasons to provide a knowledgeable opinion, because it was me who founded GEPAN within CNES in 1977. It is me who carried out the official field investigation, in Cussac, in 1978, during two days, with three other people. It is me who presented the analysis of the testimonys of Cussac to an official scientific committee composed of eight people, in 1978. Finally it is me who decided to leave the direction of GEPAN in 1979, quite simply because CNES intended "to prevent us from publishing our work", for reasons "obviously scientific", as would state publicly Mr Curien 25 years later, to a journalist of "Ciel et Espace" in 2004, "That formed part of the contract. We did not wish to publish so that we do not enter a public polemic."
More than about the absence of publication of the sighting reports, among which most are of course explained by commonplace causes, Claude Poher protests against the refusal of publication of the studies which had been completed at this time.
Jean-Jacques Vélasco, of the official ex-SEPRA, deplores that the Mexican Air Force "dissimulates" radar data (while at the same time it is them who made the case he refers known publicly). Some paragraphs further, he finds perfectly normal that French military documents relating to UFOs remain secret, reason: it is not desirable that our enemies know anything about our radar capacity. See www.lejdu.com/archives/2004/aout/jjv-interview/index.htm For the remainder, he acknoledges being restrained by very strict rules of his employer organization CNES, which prevents the publication of SEPRA UFO documents.
In the eighties, Pierre Guerin, astrophysicist and ufologist, r.i.p, told journalist Robert Roussel:
"You tell to me that according to Alain Esterle [directed the GEPAN after the departure of Claude Poher], it is not in the intentions of GEPAN to keep secret its conclusions or discoveries. Wrong! There are already things which they keep secret, in particular the studies carried out by Claude Poher, signed by all the investigators, including Alain Esterle and in which already came to the conclusion of the artificiality [of reported UFOs]. ... GEPAN is subjected to the secrecy, which appears unbearable to me and had made me hesitate to get on board. I had to sign, for my part, a paper forcing me to release no documents and to have everything go through the press service of CNES. Esterle takes us for idiots if he talks about transparency. "They" are too much afraid that this all leads to nonhuman machines to let it all out."
In France, there are people who think that we, the French public, do not need to judge by ourselves what this UFO phenomenon is all about. They prefer to keep it all secret, they think it is better, they think it is more "scientific" like that. They think that they know better than all of us. THEY THINK THAT WE DO NOT NEED TO KNOW.
