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CONTACT WITH EXTRATEREESTRIAL aVILIZATIONS
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perform in our skies,
classical theories of official science.
which have never been explained by the
Let us now suppose that they had decided some day to
gravitational forces to catch our attention and give us scientific
proof of their existence. They would evidently have many
different ways to do it, but one of the best would certainly be to
use gravitational forces to disturb suddenly the observations
made by our astronomers and physicists during a total eclipse of
the sun, which would naturally be watched by thousands of scientists.
Morever, that would have the additional advantage of
being noticed only by scientists, without the risk of causing a
panic in the general public.
Also, that phenomenon did not happen at the time of just any
solar eclipse. It happened during one of those famous total solar
eclipses that occur precisely on June 30 every nineteen years, like
the last one on June 30, 1973, or the next one on June 30, 1992. Is
it still really possible to believe that it was just another coincidence?
For that reason or some other, French scientists seem to take
the problem of flying saucers very seriously. A few years ago a
young French scientist by the name of Claude Poher, director of
the French National Center of Space Research in Toulouse, decided
to prove scientifically once and for all the actual existence
of flying saucers and to establish their composite sketch, as reported
in Paris-Match, March 23, 1974.
Out of 35,000 UFO observation reports that he had been able
to collect, he selected the thousand best ones, translated them
onto IBM punch cards, and fed them to a computer. Then he fed
to the same computer the apparent characteristics of everything
that could be seen in the sky and be mistaken for a flying saucer,
hke the planet Venus or weather balloons so dear to the U. S.
Air Force, for the computer to compare with the UFO sightings
and reach a final decision as to whether there was some correlation
between the two kinds of data.
The verdict of the computer was that, first, flying saucers really
do exist and cannot be confused with anything else in the
sky. They have landed hundreds of times in deserted spots, far
away from urban areas. They appear during the day as bright
metallic objects reflecting sunlight and casting shadows, and dur-
use