I was there when we handed the report to the Prime Minister. July 1999, ninety pages, three years of work. My name is Michel, retired now, but in '99 I was part of the COMETA association. The Committee for In-Depth Studies, that's what it stood for. We were mostly former auditors from IHEDN, the Institute of Higher Studies for National Defense. Military men, aerospace engineers, scientists. People with credentials that couldn't be easily dismissed. Let me tell you why I'm calling. Because what we put in that report, what we concluded, nobody wanted to hear it then. And here's the thing. Twenty-five years later, your government is finally saying the same things we said in 1999. UFOs are real. Some can't be explained. The extraterrestrial hypothesis can't be ruled out. We said this in France in 1999, officially, signed by generals and scientists and handed directly to the President and Prime Minister. And the world didn't care.
COMETA started informally in 1996. General Pierre Moreau came to General Henri Bonnet, who was director of IHEDN at the time, with an idea. A committee to study UFOs from a defense perspective. Real study, not debunking, not dismissal. Bonnet supported him. In February 1999, they held a conference at the Air Force Academy Alumni Association. Former pilots stood up and talked about their encounters. I was in that room. Watching these men, decorated officers, describing objects that defied physics. Nobody laughed. Nobody rolled their eyes. The committee formed officially on February 24, 1999 as a non-profit association under French law. General Moreau chaired it. The membership list, I can tell you, was impressive. General Claude Marchand of the Air Force. Admiral Jean Garnier. Pascal Fournier, chief engineer at ONERA, our National Office for Aeronautical Research. General Michel Renard, weapons engineer with a doctorate in physics. These weren't fringe people. These were France's defense and aerospace establishment.
We had access to everything GEPAN and SEPRA had collected. Those were the official French government agencies studying UFOs, part of CNES, our space agency. Since 1977, the Gendarmerie Nationale had been filing reports. Over 3,000 cases by 1999. Detailed investigations, physical evidence, radar data, multiple witnesses. We studied it all. The report had three parts. First, cases. We presented the best documented incidents from France and abroad. Second, scientific analysis. Could known physics explain what witnesses described? Third, defense implications. What should France do if these objects represent an actual phenomenon? And here's the thing. We didn't pull punches. We examined cases where radar tracked objects moving at 4,000 miles per hour with no sonic boom. Fighter pilots describing craft that matched their maneuvers, disappeared and reappeared instantly. Physical traces on the ground where objects landed. This wasn't speculation. This was documented.
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