Aliens beings must exist somewhere in the Universe, in some form or other. Of this there is little doubt. The problem confronting us is whether the evidence we possess proves that some of these aliens are visiting the Earth now. If this is so, then proving the fact would be of the utmost significance. It would be perhaps the most momentous occasion in the history of the world.
But we do not possess photographs, movie films or tape recordings of aliens, or artefacts manufactured on another world... anything that goes beyond mere testimony. In view of this paucity of hard evidence we can hardly say, with any definiteness, whether aliens are or are not visiting us . We can only make a reasoned assessment of the facts.
The dilemmas posed by close encounters of the fourth kind are starkly illustrated by a case that occurred in the north of England on 28th November l980. Police Constable Alan Godfrey had been called out to pursue some cows that were allegedly roaming a housing estate. By 5.15 a.m., still not having found them, he was ready to give up the search. While making one last trip in his patrol car before coming off duty, he saw a glow on the road ahead. He instantly thought of a works bus that regularly travelled the route and idly wondered why it was a little early. Then, as he approached the glow, it became obvious that he had been wrong.
The object that confronted PC Godfrey was like a spinning top with windows. It was hovering just above the road surface, spanning the gap between two lamp posts and it was rotating. He could see his headlights reflected in the metallic surface of the object. He could see leaves on the roadside bushes moving in the vortex created by its rotation. The road surface, soaking wet in other places, was dry in blotchy patches directly beneath the object. There was no doubt in his mind that the object was real. Maintaining the traditional calm of the British "bobby", the officer propped his clipboard on the windscreen and carefully sketched the object. But then something inexplicable happened. He suddenly found himself further down the road, driving the car away from the scene. Nonplussed, he turned the car round and drove past the spot, now deserted, where the object had been. He carried on the short distance into town and collected a colleague. Only at this point did he notice the time.
Somewhere, since the moment he first saw the UFO, 10O minutes had disappeared. Constable Godfrey had a dim memory, however - of a strange voice saying: "This is not for your eyes. You will forget it." Additional fragmentary recollections gradually filtered back to him until, nine months after the incident and with the help of UFOlogists, he underwent regression hypnosis.
This was conducted by an eminently qualified and rather sceptical psychiatrist and what appeared to be a coherent memory of the incident emerged.
The story was of the usual type: the officer had been taken on board the UFO and given a medical examination by two distinct types of humanoid creature - one tall, the other small and somewhat ugly. Remarkably, this is almost exactly what the Day family claimed happened to them during their abduction at Aveley in Essex. In fact, contact cases reported from Britain share such similarities in many features. Cases reported from other countries, on the other hand, show different similarities among themselves.
What happened to the police constable? Is he lying to us? If not, did he have an hallucination or did he undergo the events he described? Or was it something between hallucination and straightforward experience - a distortion or misinterpretation of some extraordinary events?
There happens to be unusual and powerful support for the "face-value" interpretation of the story. Four police officers on patrol 13 kilometres away had to duck as a UFO streaked low over their heads, moving directly towards the town near which the encounter took place. And a caretaker lighting a school's boilers saw in the direction of the town an object that fitted PC Godfrey's description, climbing into the sky. These stories were reported independently while the police officer was still reporting what he had just observed.
When faced with an issue like this, most people take sharply contrasting attitudes. Some would want to believe that aliens were involved. Others would deny that this was possible and would cling to the hallucination theory. Unfortunately these two hypotheses have points both in their favour and against them. So let us survey some of the difficulties that the various answers face.
Why do aliens look like us? Why do they behave like us? Why do they mirror our social and scientific developments? Why do they never tell us anything valuable to which we do not already have access? These problems are curiously like those involved in alleged memories of past lives, spirit messages and other demonstrations of survival of death. It is surely not without significance that the common factor in these cases is the frequent use of regression hypnosis and the role of the human mind. Taken together, these facts suggest a mental origin for these strange experiences.
To this type of evidence we should add research into lucid dreams. These are dreams in which the dreamer is fully aware that he is dreaming. Often the course of the dream can be controlled by conscious effort. Such dreams are rare and seem to overlap with such phenomena as hypnagogic imagery (the images, often compellingly "real", that come when we are between waking and sleep).
Although they seem so real at the time, lucid dreams and hypnagogic images give away their "unreal" nature in various subtle hints. For example, the subject does not react with normal responses. He may feel no fear, despite the weirdness of the experience. He will not wake up a sleeping bed partner to witness the events. In one case a person had such an experience, in which he thought an atomic bomb had just exploded in his garden. His response was to yawn and fall asleep. The behaviour of contact case witnesses is often like this.
Interestingly, such symptoms also occur in hallucinations that follow long periods of sensory deprivation. When a person is kept in darkness and silence and even his sense of touch is deprived of its normal stimulation because his hands are enveloped in special gloves, his mind starts to manufacture its own "perceptions" - hallucinations of sound, sight and touch. When we consider the usual setting of a type C contact - night- time, a tired driver, a lonely country road and the sudden appearance of a slightly unusual sight, such as a bright light in the sky - it does not stretch credulity very far to suggest that these could be hallucinations brought about by the lack of sensory stimulation.
In the USA Dr Alvin Lawson, a professor of English at the University of California, has conducted experiments that are relevant to the hallucination theory. He advertised for people of a "creative" turn of mind to take part in an unspecified experiment. He screened out all those who seemed to have a knowledge of, or interest in, UFO's. The rest were asked to imagine, under hypnosis, that they were being abducted by aliens. They were led on with certain key questions and the results, he claimed, were so closely akin to the stories told of allegedly real abductions that it was likely that these also were, wholly or in part, subconscious fantasies.
These different types of evidence constitute impressive support for the contention that alien contacts are hallucinatory. But unfortunately there is a fair amount of negative evidence too. Some contact experiences are shared; while collective hallucinations can occur, they are not well-understood and some encounters stretch this hypothesis to breaking point.
One Italian type A case involved seven witnesses; one British type A involved four. In some cases, such as those in Puerto Rico and that involving the English police officer, there is at least some degree of independent corroboration.
Alvin Lawson's work, as he himself recognised, showed major differences between allegedly real abductions and imagined ones, as well as similarities. When, in a UFO contact case, memories emerge by way of hypnosis, they are almost invariably associated with very strong emotions, more consistent with the memory of a real event than a fantasy. The "abductions" imagined in the laboratory did not display this effect and in general those who took part in the experiment knew afterwards that they had been fantasising.
Contact witnesses are never in any doubt that their regression memory is of a real event. It can still be argued, of course, that the remembered event, though real, is purely "mental" - a hallucination or dream.
We must also consider the frequent reports of physical effects on a witness's body, such as burns on the skin. Marks on the ground sometimes accompany these cases as well. But, on the other hand, there is almost no photographic support for the contact witnesses' stories - and physical effects can be produced psychosomatically.
Looking at more subtle features of the accounts, considerable consistency and a kind of lucid cohesiveness appear in all but the type B "bedroom visitor" cases. This tends to make the UFO investigator doubt that he is dealing with experiences more akin to dreams than reality.
It is very difficult to sort out these contradictory elements. Perhaps the fairest judgement we can make at present is to say that type B experiences seem more like vivid hallucinations than reality. Type C ("memory block") cases have elements suggesting hallucinations but, unlike type B experiences, offer some data that cast doubt on this assumption. If type C cases are indeed hallucinations, they seem to be of a unique type almost a hybrid between dream and reality. As for the most common contact cases, type A, they are the least like hallucinations. While they are full of problems, we cannot explain them as hallucinations with any degree of confidence.
What of the other extreme? Are these contacts extra-terrestrial in nature? This, the "face-value" hypothesis, implies that hundreds of different races (most of them not very imaginative variants on ourselves), from many different worlds, are taking a great deal of interest in the Earth. They perform medical examinations interminably and gather up endless cargoes of soil and rock samples. For no apparent reason the Earth is the Galaxy's Grand Central Station.
The sceptics invariably ask why the aliens don't contact someone important. Why not land on the White House lawn and thus dispel all doubts?
Gaynor Sunderland asked Arna, one of the aliens she claimed to have met, this very question. She was told that people in authority had so much credibility to lose that there was no point in contacting them, although this had been tried on a few occasions. Fear of the consequences kept such people silent. Instead the aliens pursue a policy of contacting children or simple folk, knowing that some of these will brave the ridicule and speak out.
This argument makes an intriguing amount of sense. Widespread belief in the existence of alien life is the only tangible result of decades of UFO stories. A slow, covert process of conditioning world opinion to the idea of extra-terrestrial visitors fits well with the "provocative but not probative" evidence that we possess. Solid proof would be detrimental to such a policy: it would be impounded, or hidden, or denied outright.
Suggestive indications, on the other hand, avoid the unwelcome attention of authority while providing a stimulus to continued interest and promoting the long, slow buildup of belief. Even the confusing and ridiculous behaviour of the aliens would fit this theory. In the end the only people who will not be convinced that aliens come from space will be the UFO investigators themselves!
A great deal of fascinating work remains before we can hope to know the truth. There is no hard evidence that a superior intelligence has made contact with the Earth - but we do have suggestive hints that this might be true. And, since most of us would wish UFO's to come from space, our judgement is clouded by an enormous emotional bias.
"Frenchman back to Earth with a bump" was the headline in the London Times- and across the world the media reported the news with the same uncertainty whether to take it seriously or not. But this much was certain: Franck Fontaine, who had allegedly been kidnapped by a UFO a week before, had been restored to friends, family and a wondering world in the early hours of Monday, 3rd December 1979.
Where had he spent those seven days? The world, hoping for a story that would make the Moon landing seem tame, was disappointed. Fontaine's recollections were few and confused. It seemed to him he had simply dropped off to sleep for half an hour: he was astonished and dismayed to find he had been away for a week. He attributed the strange images in his mind to dreams: he was bewildered to learn that he might have been abducted by extra-terrestrial aliens and carried to their distant world.
Fontaine was no less dismayed to find himself the focus of the world's attention. During his seven-day absence, it had been his friends Salomon N'Diaye and JeanPierre Prevost, witnesses of his abduction, who had been the objects of attention. Ever since their first startling telephone call to the police - "A friend of mine's just been carried off by a UFO!" - they had been subjected to interrogation by the police, by the press and by UFO investigative groups ranging from the scientific to the bizarre. If Fontaine's return brought renewed publicity and fresh problems, at least it cleared them of the suspicion that they were responsible for their friend's disappearance - perhaps even his death.
The life-style of the three young men was not of a sort to dispel suspicion. All three Prevost, aged 26, N'Diaye, 25, Fontaine, 18 scraped an uncertain living by selling jeans in street markets. They drove an old car that was unlicensed and uninsured, none of them having a driving licence. Prevost was a self declared anarchist. He and N'Diaye lived next door to each other in a modern block at Cergy- Pontoise on the outskirts of Paris. Fontaine lived 3 kilometres away. According to their account, Fontaine had spent Sunday evening in Prevost's flat because they wanted to be up by 3.30 a.m. to travel the 60 kilometres to the street market at Gisors.
The market didn't start until 8 a.m. but they wanted a good place. Besides, their Taunus estate car had been acting up lately, so they thought it prudent to allow extra time. At 3.30, after only about four hours sleep, they were up and ready to load the car with clothes.
First, though, they gave the car a pushstart to make sure the engine would function. Having got it going, they decided that Fontaine should stay in the car to make sure it didn't stop again while the other two got on with the loading. Fontaine had leisure to look about him and so it was that he noticed a brilliant light in the sky some distance away. When his companions arrived with their next load, he pointed the object out. It was cylindrical in shape, but otherwise unidentifiable. When it moved behind the block of flats, N'Diaye rushed upstairs to fetch a camera, thinking he might take a photograph of the object to sell to the newspapers. Prevost went in to get another load of clothing while Fontaine, hoping for another view of the mysterious object, drove up onto the main road that ran close by the flats.
Hearing the sound of the moving vehicle, his companions looked out of the windows of their respective flats. Both saw that Fontaine had stopped the car on the main road and noted that the engine was no longer running. Prevost, angry because they would probably have to push-start the car a second time, rushed downstairs again. He called to N'Diaye to forget about his camera because the UFO had vanished. N'Diaye came after him saying that in any case he had no film in his camera and adding that from his window it had looked as though the car was surrounded by a great ball of light.
Outdoors again, the two young men stopped in amazement: the rear of their car was enveloped in a sharply defined sphere of glowing mist, near which a number of smaller balls of light were moving about. While they stood watching, they saw the larger globe absorb all but one of the smaller ones. Then a beam of light emerged, which grew in size until it was like the cylindrical shape they had seen earlier. The large sphere seemed to enter this cylinder, which shot up into the sky and disappeared from sight.
The two hurried to the car, but found no sign of Fontaine. He was not in the car, in the road, or in the cabbage field beside the road. Prevost insisted on calling the police immediately and N'Diaye went off to do so. Prevost, remaining near the car, was the only witness to the last phase of the incident: a ball of light, like those previously moving about the car, seemed to push the car door shut. Then it too vanished.
Such was the account that the two young men gave to the police on their arrival a few minutes later. Because UFO sightings are a military matter in France, the police instructed Prevost and N'Diaye to inform the gendarmerie, which comes under the Ministry of National Defence. The two spent most of the day with the gendarmes, telling and retelling the story. The interrogators stopped for lunch, during which time the witnesses telephoned the press with their story.
Later, Commandant Courcoux of the Cergy gendarmerie told the press that there were no grounds for disbelieving the young men's story, that he had no doubt "something" had occurred and that he could give no indication of what that "something" might be. In a later interview he admitted, "We are swimming in fantasy."
For a week, that was all the world knew. During that week, the young men were questioned over and over again. Some people accepted the UFO story as it stood. Others suspected it to be a smoke-screen, perhaps a cunning plan to help Fontaine avoid doing his military service, perhaps something more sinister. But one fact stood out clearly: Prevost and N'Diaye had informed the police promptly and voluntarily. Given their backgrounds, wasn't this convincing proof of their sincerity?
When Fontaine gave his version of the story, there seemed no reason to question his sincerity either. He told how he had woken to find himself lying in the cabbage field. Getting to his feet, he realised he was just across the main road from the flats, close to where he had stopped the car to watch the UFO. But the car was no longer there. His first thought, as he hurried towards the still-darkened building, was that somebody had stolen their car and its valuable load of clothing. Neither Prevost nor N'Diaye was to be seen, so he rushed upstairs and rang the bell of Prevost's flat.
When there was no reply, he went to N'Diaye's. A sleepy N'Diaye appeared, gawped at him in amazement, then flung his arms round him in delighted welcome. Fontaine, already surprised to find his friend in his night clothes, was even more amazed to learn that an entire week had gone by since the morning of the Gisors market.
He had little to tell the press or the police. The world's media reported his return but reserved judgement till they heard what the authorities had to say. But the police declared it was no longer their business: no crime had been committed. Apart from the inherent improbability of Fontaine's story, they had no reason to doubt his word or that of his friends.
So now it was up to the UFO organisations to see what further light could be thrown on the case. From the start, the witnesses had been besieged by the various French groups; there are dozens of these, most of them fiercely independent and reluctant to co-operate with the others. One of the most reputable of all is Control, to whom we owe most of what we now know of the inside story of the Cergy-Pontoise case.
But another group declared its interest before Control, while Fontaine was still missing: the Institute Mondial des Sciences Avances (World Institute of Advanced Sciences). Its co-founder and spokesman was the well-known science fiction writer and author of two books about UFO's, Jimmy Guieu. Before he had carried out an investigation, Guieu affirmed his belief in the story: "No question of it, Franck Fontaine has been abducted on board a UFO", he stated in an interview.
"Admittedly I haven't questioned the young man's two companions, but I hold their account to be true a priori." Delighted to have their story accepted without reservation by so eminent an authority, Fontaine's two friends agreed to cooperate with Guieu. When Fontaine returned, he too was taken under IMSA'S wing. Guieu offered them a secret refuge in the south of France where they could work on a book together, Guieu writing it and all sharing the proceeds.
Guieu's book, Cergy-Pontoise UFO contacts, was rushed into print with astonishing speed, appearing a bare four months after Fontaine's return. Thanks to the combination of Guieu's name and the intense interest in the case, it was an instant best-seller. But readers hoping for a conclusive verdict were disappointed. The book was padded out by Guieu's journalistic style and digressive accounts of other cases and there was an almost total absence of first-hand testimony from the principal witness - the abducted Fontaine - whose story the world wanted to hear. Such revelations as the book contained were of quite another nature.
Guieu had hoped that Fontaine would be able to recall more of his adventure if he were hypnotised, but the young man obstinately refused to submit to hypnosis. Then Prevost suggested that he should be hypnotised instead. What resulted was truly amazing. It now emerged that Prevost, not Fontaine, had been the true object of alien interest. Now, speaking through him, the aliens explained all. Fontaine had simply been the means to establish communication: Prevost was the channel through whom they could communicate to help save Earth from impending disaster. The aliens identified themselves as "the intelligences from beyond" but gave no clearer clue to the whereabouts of "beyond" than that it is "a planet not like yours". Their spokesman was Haurrio, a friendly if somewhat garrulous character.
In Guieu's book, Prevost becomes the hero of the story and the only evidence we have for the events is his word. His two companions seem to have become irrelevant.
This book having raised more questions than it answered, much was hoped for when Prevost announced that he was writing his own account of the event. But The truth about the Cergy-Pontoise affair, published later that same year, was even less satisfactory. It was a rambling, incoherent farrago in which great doses of alien "philosophy" - transmitted by Prevost - show that pious platitudes about the need for more love and less science are not confined to planet Earth.
There is virtually no mention of Franck Fontaine's abduction: indeed, he and Salomon N'Diaye are scarcely referred to. But Prevost's visit to a secret alien base is described in some detail and this gives us a good yardstick for evaluating the rest of the material. It seems that one morning soon after Fontaine's return, there was a ring at Prevost's door.
The caller was a travelling salesman, a total stranger who said he had to make a trip to Bourg-de-Sirod and invited Prevost to come along. Now, Bourg-de-Sirod is a small village near the Swiss border some 360 kilometres from Cergy. On the face of it, there is no conceivable reason why a salesman should go there, nor why he should think that Prevost might wish to go there given that they were strangers in the first place. However, there was a reason for interest by Prevost. Bourg-de-Sirod was a specially significant place for him because as a child he had gone to a summer camp nearby and had later worked there. More recently still, he and Fontaine had spent a camping holiday there. So Prevost, though surprised at the stranger's offer, cheerfully accepted it. The salesman dropped him off at the village and he set off up the hill towards a particular site that had always fascinated him - a railway tunnel containing an abandoned train carriage from the Second World War.
Arriving at the tunnel in late evening, Prevost found that other people were there before him: a group of young men gathered round a fire in the open. One of them called out his name; he was from the Sahara and had recently written to Prevost. It turned out that he and the others had come there from many parts of the world, thanks to the "intelligences from beyond". Each spoke his own language - but was understood by the rest.
When Haurrio, the alien representative, arrived, he informed them that they had been chosen to spread the philosophy of the "intelligences" on Earth. A beautiful female alien then took them on a tour of the tunnel, now being used as a UFO base. They saw several spacecraft, similar to ones that Prevost had seen as a child. After their tour, the young men returned to their camp fire and went to sleep on the ground - which, on a December night in the mountains, must have been less than comfortable. Next morning Prevost found his friendly salesman waiting to chauffeur him back to Cergy.
Whether Jimmy Guieu and Jean-Pierre Prevost seriously expected their accounts to be believed, we may never know. But the more they provided in the way of checkable statements, the harder it became to accept the original account of the alleged abduction. Doubts grew even more when an investigative team from Control persisted in taking up the case without the co-operation of the witnesses - checking all the conflicting statements and fragmented testimony as best they could.
The abduction of Franck Fontaine by a UFO, though unsubstantiated by scientific evidence, seemed a plausible story on first hearing. Had he and his friends Jean-Pierre Prevost and Salomon N'Diaye been content to tell that story and nothing else, they might have convinced an interested world of its truth. But the two books on the case - one by the well-known science fiction writer Jimmy Guieu and one by Prevost himself- raised questions that cast suspicion on the entire affair.
Moreover, there were many interviews and conferences in which widely divergent material was put forward. And Prevost, who had pre-empted Fontaine as the hero of the Cergy- Pontoise UFO affair, even published a short-lived journal in which he kept the public informed of his continuing dialogue with the "intelligences from beyond" who he claimed had contacted him.
All this increased the doubts of the sceptics. Michel Piccin and his colleagues of the Control organisation had detected inconsistencies and contradictions in the witnesses statements from the start. And the more they probed, the more discrepancies they found.
It began with trivial, marginal matters, like Prevost's insistence that before the encounter he had no interest in or knowledge of UFO's. The Control investigators found that his brother was a French representative of the American UFO organisation APRO. Even if Prevost did not share his brother's interest in UFO's, he could hardly have been unaware of them. Besides, in his own book, Prevost had said that he saw several spacecraft similar to ones he had "seen as a child" when the "intelligences" took him to their UFO base.
He also denied seeing a magazine in which a UFO abduction story, very like Fontaine's, was being serialised. Yet Control established that this very magazine was in Prevost' s flat at the time of the Cergy-Pontoise abduction.
The events of the night before the abduction became more confused the more they were investigated. Control discovered that there were five people - not three - in Prevost's flat that night. Why had the published accounts almost completely failed to mention the presence of Corinne, Prevost's girlfriend and Fabrice Joly? One reason suggested itself: knowledge of the presence of the fourth young man, Joly, might throw doubt on one of the facts most favourable to Prevost and N'Diaye. They had claimed that they had gone straight to the police when Fontaine vanished from their car, even though they knew they might get into trouble because they were driving without a licence. But Joly was there because he had a valid licence and had agreed to drive the three friends to the market at Gisors.
Why were Corinne and Joly never questioned about what happened? Did they see and hear nothing? They could certainly have straightened out some of the contradictions, for Fontaine, Prevost and N'Diaye could not even agree on who had been at the flat on the night before the abduction- surely one of the most memorable of their lives. First the three had said they spent the night together. Then Prevost recollected that he had watched a television film with friends elsewhere.
Other discrepancies force us to ask how far we can trust their account. They said that they were dubious about their car's ability to start and pushed it to get the motor running, then left Fontaine in the car to make sure it didn't stop. Why didn't Joly, the only licensed driver, do this so that Fontaine could lend a hand with loading the jeans for the market? Did they really sit outside the block of flats at 4 a.m. with the motor running without any complaint from the neighbours? None of the other residents seem even to have heard the sound. What about N'Diaye's completely opposing statement that they loaded the car first and only then started the motor? Whom should we believe?
The account of the one neighbour who did witness anything only makes matters more confused. Returning home at the time the young men were supposedly loading the car, he said he saw two people get into the Taunus estate car and drive away. Yet the three involved said that Fontaine was alone when he drove up onto the road to get a better view of the UFO they had spotted.
Even though UFO's are notoriously difficult to describe, the three accounts of the one at Cergy-Pontoise are particularly far apart. One saw "a huge beam", another "a ball", the third "a flash". One said it was moving fairly slowly, taking two minutes to cross the sky; the others said it was moving fast, gone in a matter of seconds. There was further disagreement about the direction in which it was moving.
The circumstances of Fontaine's return a week after his supposed abduction are no less confused as several stories emerged. One of the journalists covering the case was Iris Billon-Duplan, who worked for a local newspaper and lived close by. Apart from the special interest of a case that had occurred almost on her doorstep, the fact that she lived nearby meant she could follow it personally. As a result, she became closely involved with the witnesses. Indeed, she spent the night before Fontaine's return with Prevost, preparing a definitive account of the case.
According to the journalist's published account, N'Diaye went off to bed shortly after midnight, leaving her with Prevost. He told her that he had no food or money because his involvement in the UFO affair was keeping him from working. So she suggested that they go to her flat where she could give him a meal while they continued to work on the article. This explains why Fontaine did not find Prevost in when he returned and went to Prevost's flat. We know that Fontaine then went to N'Diaye's flat and succeeded in rousing him. But according to the journalist's account, N'Diaye then left Fontaine and hurried round to her flat to tell her and Prevost the news. Should we believe Iris Billon-Duplan or Salomon N'Diaye? For his statement, made to the police, flatly contradicts hers.
His story was that he happened to wake up at about 4.30 a.m., looked out of his window and saw a ball of light on the main road. When he saw a silhouetted figure emerge from it, he recognised his friend Franck Fontaine. He then hurried to a telephone to report the return to Radio Luxembourg, believing he would get a reward for information about Fontaine's whereabouts. (In this he was mistaken; it was Europe Numero I that had offered a reward.)
Radio Luxembourg later confirmed that such a call had been made, but not at 4.30 a.m. because there was nobody on duty at that hour. The implication is that N'Diaye telephoned later than 4.30 a.m. and that he waited to inform the police until he had attempted to claim the reward money - not saying much for his concern about his friend. In the event, it was Radio Luxembourg staff who told the police that Franck Fontaine had returned. According to them, they had received an anonymous call from a man who, just as he was going to work, saw Fontaine coming back. Surely N'Diaye would not have made an anonymous call if he wanted to collect the reward.
These contradictions are just a sample from Control's 50-page report. There is confusion, if not outright deception, at every stage of the affair. Some of the discrepancies can be attributed to faulty memory, but such an explanation can hardly be stretched to account for Prevost's extraordinary visit to the tunnel. As a case history, Cergy-Pontoise is so ambiguous that few will be ready to give it serious credence. Yet it caused such a sensation that it is still worth asking what really happened. If the abduction was not genuine, was it a put-up job from the outset? Or did the witnesses gradually distort what was fundamentally a true UFO experience? If so, at what point did deceit and contrivance begin? There are several ways to answer these questions.
We may believe that Franck Fontaine was abducted as claimed, that all the witnesses were doing their best to tell the truth and that contradictions crept in because of defective memory. However, the extent of the discrepancies makes it easier to believe that the trio elaborated the story for their own purposes, adding sensational details that they may or may not have believed actually happened.
Alternatively, we may surmise that Franck Fontaine was not in fact abducted, but that he sincerely believed he was. He may have been in, or put into, some altered state of consciousness in which he experienced the illusion of the abduction. That this can happen is an established psychological phenomenon, so we cannot rule it out altogether. But it does raise questions about Fontaine's two friends. If he was deluded, where do they stand? Were they also in an altered state of consciousness, experiencing or being made to believe in the same illusion? And does this explain the contradictions? If so, who fed them the illusion and made them believe in its reality?
While neither of these explanations can be ruled out entirely, we may consider it most plausible that the whole affair was a fabrication from the start - that there never was any abduction and that the three young men put the story together for fun, for gain or for some undiscovered ideological motive. We know that the trio immediately co-operated with Jimmy Guieu in a commercial enterprise. We learn from Control that Prevost, clearly the dominant one of the three, was noted for practical joking at school. Indeed he told the Control investigators, "You bet i'm a clown!"
The reports are consistent with the hypothesis that Prevost persuaded his two companions to stage a hoax, but that Corinne and Fabrice Joly refused to go along. Perhaps none of them expected their story to attract so much attention and they were forced to improvise beyond their prepared narrative. This could explain such muddles as the contradictory accounts of Fontaine's return.
P ALIGN="JUSTIFY">Another question then arises: was Guieu a party to the deception? Did he suspect the story from the start but, as a professional writer, recognise its money-making potential? Did he start by believing them, as he claimed to do, then discover the hoax but decide to go along with it - perhaps because he was already committed? Or did he believe that the affair was genuine? The last supposition seems unlikely in the light of Guieu's long involvement with UFOlogy, unless he was unusually gullible. On the other hand, it is hard to believe that he would risk his reputation by endorsing a case that he knew to be a fake. We are probably left with the surmise that he discovered a hoax but decided not to reveal it for reasons of his own.If the Cergy-Pontoise contact was indeed all a hoax, it would explain why the trio committed themselves to the uncritical Guieu and his Institut Mondial des Sciences Avances (World I Institue of Advanced Sciences). IMSA has little following or reputation, but Guieu offered the backing of a big name, sympathetic support and the chance to make a substantial profit from a book bearing his name. And other UFO organisations might have uncovered the deceit in a short time, if deceit it was.
In the absence of any definite proof, all this is merely speculative. Will the truth ever be established? There are hopes that it may be. During their researches, Control came across a tantalising clue that they were unable to follow up. It seems that during Fontaine's disappearance, a school in Cergy-Pontoise was working on a project about it with the local newspaper - the one that was later to carry Iris Billon-Duplan's version of Fontaine's return. Some of the children learned that one of the school workers was an aunt of Fontaine and interviewed her as part of their project in the presence of one of the teachers and one of Iris Billon- Duplan's colleagues from the paper.
During the interview, Fontaine's aunt said angrily that she knew perfectly well where her nephew was. He was, she said, staying with a friend.
Was she stating a fact or simply saying what she thought to be true? Who was the friend and where did he or she live? The answers to these questions could settle the Cergy- Pontoise mystery. But until we learn if someone knew where Fontaine was all the time, the case must remain open.
End.
