From: Gildas Bourdais <GBourdais@aol.com>
Date: Sun, 31 Oct 1999 12:25:46 EST
Fwd Date: Sun, 31 Oct 1999 18:45:11 -0500
Subject: Re: British Ufology Has Been Reborn!


 >From: Jenny Randles <nufon@currantbun.com>
 >To: UFO UpDates - Toronto <updates@globalserve.net>
 >Subject: Re: British Ufology Has Been Reborn!
 >Date: Fri, 29 Oct 1999 23:47:10 +0100

 >>From: Gildas Bourdais <GBourdais@aol.com>
 >>Date: Fri, 29 Oct 1999 13:49:26 EDT
 >>Subject: Re: British Ufology Has Been Reborn!
 >>To: updates@globalserve.net

 >>Recently, Jenny Randles questioned the French COMETA report, for
 >>its presentation of the famous Lakenheath case (message of July
 >>25) :

 ><snip>

 >>Well, Jenny Randles raised that question as a "test of the
 >>objectivity of COMETA". To me it is now a test of her
 >>objectivity : how can you play such a trick, Mrs Randles ?

 >You are misleading this list attrociously.

<snip>

To Mrs Jenny Randles and the List

In order to answer to your message of October 30, I have asked
journalist Bernard Thouanel his reaction : you will find it as a
second part of this message, sent with his approval of course. I
admit that I have used his private exchange a bit too fast. He
did authorize me to use abstracts of his E-Mail message to you
and mention your answer (and he explains the reason why), but he
had asked for me to submit my message to him before sending it,
which I forgot to do. However, as you will see, apart from that,
we are fundamentally in agreement.

First, I inform you that I made my message at the request of the
Cometa.

I can tell you that they were quite upset by your questioning,
coming just after violent attacks by two French ufologists,
Pierre Lagrange in the French press and Perry Petrakis on the
Internet, a few days after the publication of their report by
the magazine VSD "Special Issue" in July.

UFO UpDates subscribers may recall the very negative message of
Petrakis which was passed on this list on July 22, less than one
week after the publication of the report in France.

Then came your message of July 25 questioning the quality of
their work, before having had any chance to look at it. It was
resented as a very unfriendly attitude by Cometa.

These attacks led me to write urgently a summary of their
report, although I had no connection with them at the time. They
approved it, I passed it on the Internet at the beginning of
August, and they thanked me for that.

You claim now that your statement was perfectly normal. Well, I
maintain it was not, and the reason why is very simple to grasp
:

You reproached the Cometa to not have asked you for your new
testimonies of pilots on the Lakenheath case. But you knew that,
if they had asked for a documented file on them, you could not
have given it !

So, if we juge the situation from an objective viewpoint, all
you could give was a few pages in your book " Something in the
Air " (" Danger in the Air " in the American edition), and maybe
a copy of the BBC show. Clearly not enough to attack them the
way you did.

OK, they did not have your book. I suspect that, even if they
had it, they might have decided not to mention it and preferred
to wait for more solid official documentation.

I maintain that it was a pretty bad trick on your part, just at
the moment when the report was under violent attack by Petrakis
on the Internet, and by Pierre Lagrange in the French press.

For the record, Lagrange signed a full page article in the well
known newspaper " Liberation ", as soon as July 21, with this
grotesque accusation :

" Between " X Files " and " Independance day ", the report of "
experts " published by VSD feeds the disinformation on UFOs by
ridiculing the subject. But ufologists are far from being all
crazy people ".

And the French weekly " L’Express ", quoting the same
Lagrange, titled " UFOs : A delirious report ". After that,
there was deafening silence in the French medias (recently, a
CableTV debate show on UFOs did not even mention it).

Very recently, there has been an article by Perry Petrakis in
his own UFO review," Phenomena ", attacking again violently the
Cometa report. In this article, your message of July 25 is
entirely reproduced, translated in French, and presented as a
major argument against the report.

What is going on ? Why all these violent attacks against a
report which surely is not perfect, but has the merit of voicing
a positive opinion on UFOs from a batch of senior military
officers ? I suspect that the answer is that they have thrown a
stone in the pond of UFO secrecy, and some people don't like
that ! They had the courage to consider seriously the Roswell
case and to question the American policy of secrecy regarding
UFOs. Pretty embarassing, coming from several French generals,
isn't it?

One more word on the never ending question of evidence of alien
presence on this planet. To me, there is a mountain of evidence
of that presence, and it’s a kind of surrealistic debate to
question it. You just have to read the Twining letter of
September 1947, for instance, to begin to grasp that.

Gildas Bourdais


Now herewith is the message sent to me by journalist Bernard
Thouanel, with his authorization to transmit it on UFO UpDates
(written in English for that purpose) :

Dear Gildas,

After the recent publication this autumn of an article written
by ufologist Perry Petrakis in his magazine "Phenomena" n° 42,
entitled "The War of the Worlds as viewed by COMETA", and
precisely the last part  (pages 18 and 19) showing the position
of the british ufologist, Mrs Jenny Randles about the 1956
Lakenheath case, and after an in depth discussion of it with
several Cometa members, on one side, and yourself on another
side, I decided to react and communicate an abstract of my
E-Mail private correspondence I had this summer with Mrs
Randles, precisely on lastJuly 26th.

Several days later, in october,  you mentionned over the phone
that you intented to publish a message on the UFO Updates list
using some elements of these E-Mail messages between Mrs Randles
and myself.

At this time,  and regarding the situation, I gave you my full
agreement to use parts of this exchange on the only condition
that you would  submit your message to me before sending it, in
the view of verifying that any private details could be wrongly
given to the  List.

I would have greatly appreciated to receive a copy of your
message before it was sent on UFO Updates, but for a reason I
could not explain, you did not do it.

Secondly, Mrs Randles is right when she says that our exchange
was done  under privacy at this time. I proposed her such an
agreement because at this time the Cometa and my publisher, Mr.
François Siegel, advised me not to make publicity over the
web, as objectively, I was involved officially in the
publication of the Cometa Report.

But I disagree when Mrs Randles explains to you that she
supplied me with a  copy of his book  entitled "Danger in the
Air", with her permission to use information  she wrote in it on
the Lakenheath case, for making an article in the next  V.S.D.
"Hors-Serie". Anyway, acting such a way without having the
written permission of both author and publisher would mean a
possible copyright infringement. It was simply and purely  an
exchange, by which I mailed her a copy of the Cometa Report
published by VSD "Hors-Serie", and Mrs Randles sent me a copy of
her book "Danger in the Air"  just for a possible review in the
magazine.  Period. I note that Mrs Randles never aknowledged to
have well  received the copy of the report mailed to her
address.

Third, although I proposed her an exchange of documents
involving UFO sightings by French  pilots (and possibly an
introduction to the pilots), I confirm that Mrs Randles seems
very reluctant, and did not want to (or could not) introduce me
to the RAF retired crews involved in the 1956 Lakenheath case
(nearly 44 years ago!)  or give me any official documents she
obtained, mainly because of her contract with BBC, as she
claimed, and (right or wrong), because of the Official Secrets
Act regarding RAF crews.

I respect her position as she is totally free to cooperate
or not with  a foreign aerospace journalist.

But I am very amazed to discover what she claimed in
her last message to UFO Updates.

Incidently, she never informed or proposed me that next year I
could receive a UFOIN  report about the 1956 case in the near
future.

As a matter of fact, this association (as British Ufology
rebirth!) did not exist at the time of our correspondence in
July.

As far as I know, Mrs Randles did not propose either to send me
a video tape  showing the BBC interview with the RAF retired
Venom crews, which was aired several years ago on the T.V.
channels in England, and presumably in the USA.

It goes without saying that I would have appreciated such a
proposal, and possibly would have introduced Mrs Randles to the
Cometa, for an additional information  on the Lakenheath case.
But she did not.

So, I am wondering why Mrs Jenny Randles made so much noise
about  the Cometa investigation policy concerning the 1956
Lakenheath case on the UFO Updates list and possibly on other
lists, if she could not provide them with all the details she
has, or if she would not have the will to communicate the
official documents and the interview transcript she obtained to
the Cometa or/and journalists.

There is a nonsense here I could not understand
from Mrs Randles.

I don't find personally this is effectively a very cooperative
way of thinking.


That's all I can say about this.

Sincerely,

Bernard Thouanel
Editor-in-Chief

V.S.D. "Hors-Serie"