What happened to you on the A10 motorway in 2011?

I wanted to go to Orléans with friends for the weekend. I was not driving and was looking at the sky when I saw some kind of light spot of quite large size, whitish, with a green glow towards the back, moving horizontally. At the time I said to myself, “It must be a hallucination or a reflection in the window.” Except the other passengers had seen it too and that was all we talked about! I was even more confused because my training means I know what atmospheric re-entry is and what it can look like. It was completely different there. So I wrote a report for Geipan (1), then the discussion with my friends focused on the “Cometa” report, which I did not know.

What was this report about and what did it say?

It is a report submitted in 1999 to Lionel Jospin and Jacques Chirac, which concluded that “the almost certain physical reality of completely unknown flying objects.” What I then discover is that the members of Cometa are people I know, some of them are space specialists, former high-ranking Air Force officers… In short, serious people who have other things to do than have fun have speculations about aliens. Through this chance observation on the highway, I discovered work on unidentified aerospace phenomena (PAN), to the point where I am now chairman of the Sigma-2 Commission, which brings together specialists to study the BANG. And that even though these questions have never particularly fascinated me!

What have you particularly discovered during these years?

That there are phenomena that are more than fascinating and invite us to take a closer look at the topic. Our task is precisely to collect and analyze information to find explanations for these phenomena. We have a team consisting of specialists in lightning, microwaves, electromagnetic radiation, plasmas, aviation systems, air defense, ex-military personnel, fighter pilots, biologists, etc.

How are other countries dealing with this issue? Especially the United States?

Events in the United States have long been silenced, especially at the military level. However, we note a twist in this doctrine: Congress has taken up the matter with the desire to shed light on the issue by establishing a commission that itself also has difficulty accessing information such as that related to the Nimitz affair.

What is this Nimitz affair about?

In 2004, an aircraft carrier battle group conducted maneuvers off the coast of San Diego. From day one, they observed bizarre high-altitude radar trails. A patrol is sent to the area and observes, this time at sea level, an object in the shape of a “Tic-Tac”. A second patrol finds the object performing extremely fast maneuvers. A third person manages to film it with a thermal imaging camera. Strangely, these images are unclassified and cause quite a stir when they are published.

They report observations near sensitive facilities, such as missile silos. It’s still worrying, isn’t it?

In 1981 there was a flight over the Albion Plateau in France, which was documented by Cnes (2). A year earlier, in the village of Saint-Christol, near the same Albion plateau, commandos responsible for monitoring the site observed glowing orange orbs moving, approaching and pulsating for several hours. In the United States, many cases of overflights at bases with residential silos near the Canadian border have been observed and are now also being investigated by Congress.

What happens during these “visits”?

During these events, communications failures and even unexpected and uncontrollable opening of missile silo doors were reported throughout the United States. We’re talking about official reports, sworn statements, knowing that Americans aren’t kidding about them. Similar phenomena have been reported in Ukraine and Russia. We can smile at this, but there are radar traces of these events, reports, electronic records of objects following American B52 bombers…

Can you tell us what happened in England in 1956 and France in 1957?

The Lakenheath case in England is a reference case as it consists of direct observations and radar traces and lasts several hours. What he reports is the presence of two luminous objects moving in an incredible way: a speed of more than 6,000 km/h, no inertia, no trace of combustion… Technologically, we don’t know how to do this, and we In 1956 they knew even less. In France this happened near the Cognac base. An Army report mentions two radar tracks recorded thirty minutes apart that indicate a flight at 2,800 km/h at an altitude of less than 5,000 meters. However, this is not only unlikely from the perspective of the technology at the time, but also probably caused a lot of noise due to the sonic booms. There was no noise.

What do you say to yourself when you are an aeronautical engineer and analyze these facts?

We tell ourselves that we are dealing with things we don’t know. And which in certain cases may resemble objects of technological origin.

They are surprised that we fund space exploration, but studying what is happening in our “near suburbs” achieves almost nothing. For what ?

This is an issue that is somewhat overused by the authorities. Certain journalistic treatments could also have given the impression that this was a topic reserved for the enlightened. The scientific community treats the topic with a kind of disdain. Avi Loeb, an astrophysicist at Harvard University and friend and colleague of Stephen Hawking, is sometimes ridiculed for his project to observe unknown aerospace phenomena. This is unfortunate because I am convinced that we can learn a lot from observations in our atmosphere.

Samuel Ribot ALP