The article below was published in the daily newspaper Sud Ouest, France, on June 6, 1980.
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TO CLAIM to have been kidnapped by an unidentified flying object (UFO) is a matter of fabrications, says in substance the National Center for Space Studies (CNES) in a report on the famous case of Cergy-Pontoise which, at the end of the year 1979, hit the headlines.
This report, available at the C.N.E.S. at the Paris Air Show, was established by a service of this center specialized in the study of unidentified aerospace phenomena. It is titled: "About a disappearance".
The text, a hundred pages long, is coded, the names of people and places were changed but the date of the "kidnapping", November 26, 1979 and the facts reported leave no doubt, as to "event" to which reference is made.
The "victim" of this "kidnapping" had stated that a U.F.O. had crashed into his car and that he had disappeared aboard the craft at Cergy-Pontoise, Val-d'Oise, on November 26, 1979. He added that he had returned from "elsewhere" on December 3, 1979.
His confused explanations and the testimonies of his friends had suggested a collective hallucination. Then the possibility of a hoax was generally mentioned, without being really demonstrated at the time.
The hero of this "adventure" has since participated in conferences and has even written several articles. On August 14, 1980, he announced that extraterrestrials would land the next day in a tunnel of the Jura (two thousand people who had gathered there to attend the phenomenon were deceived).
G.E.P.A.N. is based in Toulouse and was created in 1977. It is responsible for receiving mainly gendarmerie reports, suspicious photos and testimonials of people claiming to have seen strange spatial phenomena.
