UFOs in the daily Press:

LE FIGARO. -- When and how did you get interested in the possible existence extraterrestrials?

Jean Gabriel GRESLE. -- I seldom use this term "extraterrestrials". We do not know what it may cover. It is only a label put on our ignorance! My interest was awaken in 1952. I was a student pilot in the US Air Force. On July 19, radio programs were interrupted to announce that unknown machines flew over the district of Washington, right in the forbidden area. On the next saturday, it happened again. Within the US Air Force, we quickly understood that the reassuring explanations given to the public did not hold upright. My comrades and I knew that these unknown machines had indeed been followed on radar sets and seen by the jet fighters for an interception. During the summer, an instructor and his pupil, in night flight above North Carolina, were outpaced by a fuselage without wing. The next year, we received the first version of a standard procedure which specified the action to be taken in the event of an encounter with an unidentified flying object. These were not divagations of drunkards!

Since then, your interest never dropped.

Isn't this the case, when you face a question to which you do not have an answer? When I was a commander in Air France, once, above Detroit, I was outpaced by am unknown craft, luminous, very fast. The radar dtected it and that was confirmed by two others airline pilot. Other crews had similar experiences.

You piled up quite a sum of disconcerting documents.

Essentially, these are documents from the FBI files, some 1600 pages. Indisputable documents which all are proof that the strange phenomena observed since World War II cannot be simple atmospheric phenomena but that it consists in intrusions of unknown machines whose technical performances are much ahead than that of the American jet fighters. And since nobody on this earth could implement such a technology, one is brought to postulate, I do not say to believe, but to postulate, that there is something...

But what?

I do not know. But I regret that this topics which at the least poses a problem of national defense - countries considered powerful cannot prevent incursion into their airspace by unidentified flying objects whose technology is of a higher level than what they have - is occulted or reserved to a circle of initiates mocked as mild lunatics. It is the the skin deep reactions caused by the mention of this problem, which seem to me delirious, and not the subject itself which could not be more serious.

You put forth assumptions that this something...

It is inevitably, either an unknown terrestrial ethnos group or visitors. And, if we are not alone, if there exists elsewhere a presence which has a furtive technology, but which does not need to make an official contact with us, that would really deserve much thinking...

What puzzles you the most?

It's that the French press refuses to speak about the Cometa report, a report entitled "UFOS and the defense," signed, in particular, by two Admirals and five Generals, therefore people who are entrusted the defense of our country. The reports tells that although not proved, the assumption of extraterrestrial visitors is the least improbable to explain such phenomena.

Remarks collected
by Christine Favet-Mycia

(1) Documents interdits, Ce que savent les Etats-Major, Jean Gabriel Greslé, Dervy publisher.