This article was published in the daily newspaper Le Télégramme de Brest, 19 mars 1973.
In spite of the terrible competition with "The Last Tango in Paris", the first national symposium on the unidentified flying objects gathered Saturday evening in Quimper more than four hundred participants. The truth forces us to say that the room of the avenue of the Station was not less full than that of Toul-ar-Laer. But let us stop there parallel and return it to our saucers.
Let us specify however that the public was diversified. It went from chicks in miniskirts in the splendour of her twenties, to the seventy-years-old with glasses, and the young bearded intellectual, and the fourtysome skeptic layman. One also noticed some members of the liberal professions - doctors, pharmacists - in the room, often accompanied of their Ladies.
So it was Mr. Sévère, secretary of the National Research Commission who shot first. He immediately emphasized "the narrow conformism of our society" which "does not pay the attention that they deserve to these problems. The majority of the physicists are reticent, although the U.F.O. appeared abundantly. The United States were the first to considered the subject but noting that they were absolutely not prototypes developed by their terrestrial adversaries, they were not interested in it anymore."
"The mystery thus remains, states Mr. Sévère, in spite of the assertion by several scientific commissions of the non-existence of the unidentified flying objects."
Mr. René Fouère [Fouéré], who followed him at the microphone, quotes several astronomers. Without being convinced of the existence of the U.F.O., those underline however that if the saucers are a reality, "they can be only of extraterrestrial origin". The debate, or rather the speech by Mr. Rene Fouère [Fouéré], took its true dimension.
Unfortunately, nothing proves until now the cogency of such thesis. It does not matter after all; isn't it dangerous to limit the future of science just by claiming that what we cannot currently explain does not exist? "Are we not facing highly conservative and comforting reflexes intended to avoid every rethinking into fundamental question our schemes of thinking?" Weren't the biggest scientists ignored and, even sometimes comdemned, as Galileo proves?
Then Mr Rene Fouère [Fouéré] comments on a score of case of appearances of saucers and other flying cigars. Not without granting much more time to the landings than to the celestial phenomena. Very persuasive, the speaker shakes the most skeptics, as well by his moderation as by the multiple details supporting his talk.
Asked about his passion for the flying saucers, he answers: "I do not have a passion for the flying saucers, but I have the passion for the truth and it is the passion for the truth which you need to have if you want to prove the existence of the flying saucers".
After the presentation of many slides by Mr. Jean-Louis Becquereau and a short discussion, the meeting was ended. It was more than half past midnight. The specialists disbanded without coming to any conclusion. Let's be honest, it was not the goal of this conference which left the residents of Quimper a bit frustrated. Isn't it better so?
The door thus remains open to all the explanations, all the assumptions, all the thesis. In this century of competitivity and excess competition, man still needs the marvellous. For scientific reasons, one can think that these phenomena are indeed the deeds of extraterrestrial beings; and for the same reasons that it is absolutely not so.
Since we are in Brittany, we are perfectly free to estimate that the goblins of our grandmothers motorized themselves. Unless that's the saints who give up any triumphalism - acting in conformormity to the evolution of the Church - giveing up their aureoles that fall down whirling from the paradise...
But if you believe neither in science, neither in God, nor in your province, comfort yourself by contemplating the answer of a famous American man of letters:
"Faith is something beautiful, but all culture in in the doubt."
J. L. N.
