Flying Saucer Review August 1980 [antikvár]

resemblance to a symbol in the Cyrillic alphabet. A further point dealt with in the article was the alleged discovery of artifacts where another UFO was said to have landed at Santa Monica. These consisted of a number of small sealed metal tubes, and the press evinced great interest when a circular letter was received by business people from a "Henri Dagousset", in which a reward of 18000 pesetas was offered for each tube sent to his secretary at a Madrid P.O.Box number. A part of a tube was recovered from a boy, at a small price, by none other than the elusive "Antonio Pardo" who sent it, and the plastic strip it contained, to Sr. Lleget, from whom it was forwarded to Srs. Ribera and Farriols. The strip had embossed on it a similar type of sign to that seen on the belly of the San José de Valderas saucer. The items were sent for analysis to the Spanish National Technical Institute for Aeronautics and Space, and the results were surprising to say the least: the metal was nickel of ". . .an extraordinarily high degree of purity, while the plastic strip was polyvinyl flouride, a type of plastic at that time not available commercially. . . and which, up to that time, had been manufactured only by the American firm Dupont Nemours." "Was it an extraterrestrial craft?" asked Sr. Ribera. While he was not sure on that point, he reiterated that "the object 'was there' all right. . ." With the benefit of hindsight it is easy to see that alarm bells should have been ringing about the photographs. There was another matter engaging our attention, however, and that was the matter of the UMMO documents which had been circulating for some years; indeed we had been "sitting on them" for a long time, and continued to do so for several years. The whole matter was very perplexing, but when the San José de Valderas photographs turned up one thing was paramountly obvious, and that was that the sign on the underbelly of the photographed object was of the same configuration as the "seal" to be found on the "authentic" UMMO documents which were being distributed around the globe. After much heart-searching, FSR published a summary of the UMMO events and papers, by Antonio Ribera, with no outlandish claims being made (in all conscience the contents of the documents were sufficiently outlandish!). It is interesting to note that in one of his conclusions Sr. Ribera proposed a hypothesis that " some unknown terrestrial agency is trying to discredit the whole business of 'flying saucers' and 'extraterrestrials' and is launching this complicated manoeuvre which, when the opportune moment comes, will be exposed, thus bringing the most fearful ridicule upon all those who have taken seriously the existence of 'Ummites'." He thereafter refers to the secret clause, 4a which was uncovered by the late Dr. James E. McDonald added to the recommendations of the Robertson Commission of January 1963, in which the CIA called for the debunking of saucer reports by the services. The five-part UMMO article finally appeared in FSR Vol. 20, Nos. 4 & 5 (1974) and Vol. 21, Nos. 1, 2 & 3/4 (1975). In FSR Vol. 20, No. 5, Gordon Creighton made "A brief comment on the 'UMMO' affair" in which he pointed out that it had been claimed that ". . .it all began in France in 1950 when the 'Ummites' allegedly made their first landing at a place near La Javie (Department of the Basses Alpes)." Apparently the French authorities were very concerned as well as, over the years, some leading French researchers and helicopters were used in a search for the lonely farmhouse where the interiopers allegedly had made their first base. The previous owners of the dilapidated farm were discovered living in great opulence in fine villas on the French Riviera, and were keeping their mouths shut like clams. One was forced to concede that if UMMO were a hoax, then it must be a pretty massive undertaking. In 1977 a bulletin put out by the Center for UFO Studies, edited by Mrs. Mimi Hynek, carried an analysis by Dr. Claude Poher of the San José de Valderas photographs, and of the UMMO documents, which latter, he stated, were part of a monstrous hoax which according to our information at the time seemed to be something of a 'U-turn.' Dr. Poher pointed out that 50% of the information in the UMMO documents is correct, while the rest is manifestly false; that the level of scientific knowledge required to create the documents. . . is about that of the first year of graduate study of the sciences; that there seems little probability that the affair could have been created by only one person. . . and that the background necessary for such a hoax, if it was a hoax, exceeds the capabilities of a private group. As for the San José de Valderas photographs, Dr. Poher had conducted a study on them over several months using the impressive facilities of the National Centre for Space Studies at Toulouse. He concluded ". . .that the photographs are a hoax, produced by using a small model of translucent plastic on which the insignia was drawn in ink. This model was suspended for the photographer by means of a very fine line, great care being taken not to let the 'fishing rod' appear on the negatives. This explains the normal line of sight. Dr. Poher felt highly suspicious of the part played by the "much-too-omniprescent Sr. Jordán," and states that ". . .the entire UMMO affair is tied up with these sightings [Aluche and San José de Valderas photographs] and all of it collapses altogether. ' ' Dr. Poher's findings on the photographs were confirmed by a further report in the bulletin under the signatures of William Spaulding (Director of Ground Saucer Watch, Western Division) and Fred Adrian (photographic consultant GSW) who performed a computer photographic analysis of the San José de Valderas photographs. Among their conclusions we read that ". . .