Petit-Rechain
Anyway, RTL has added another video today - 16 minute feature about the whole story. Guests in the studio were Auguste Meessen and Pierre Magarain.
http://www.rtl.be/videos/video/345410.aspx
If anyone can paraphrase (from French) what was said on that last 16 minute video that would be great.
Here's a transcript of the first 7 min of the interview :
J is the journalist, AM is August Meessen (on the right) and P.M is Pierre Magain (on the left)
J : for 20 years some has believed that we had been visited by ETs while in fact it was hoax with a picture of a model. Nonetheless, the UFOs remain unidentified objects that still beg an explanation. To talk about it we receive PM, you are astrophysicist and professor at the ULG, next to you AM, hello, you are physicist and emeritus professor at the UCL. [to AM] This picture, you have dedicated part of your life, today you seem to be skeptical faced with the confession of this person.
AM: I'm not skeptical, I want to understand. So when I got this news I went there to ask him how he had done. And this is a technical problem and that interests me. That the picture is a hoax is secondary and we have to relativize, because a "tree shouldn't mask the forest" and the "forest" is the ufo phenomenon.
J: but this picture, still, I was looking in the news coverage we diffused in the 19 PM journal , you were really asking some explanations to this person, you said you didn't understand some technical details and that for you it couldn't be possible that it was a hoax.
AM : I'm going to tell you immediately what the problem is. you see the picture...presents...you have big lights, and the witness says he used a frigolite model with 4 small lamps from a small torch and how can this make these effects? you see it from the object[showing the 1stpicture]...in the blue sensible layer [showing the 2nd blue picture], and you see, everyone who studied the picture found the same effects. So there's here a technical problem. I continue my investigation, I found another witness. There were only two people to be aware. I found the other witness, I continue my investigation and there may be a track that may explain and that may be done further in time.
J: PM, you, this picture, did you believe at a moment that it was genuine?
PM: when the picture was published, with a colleague of the observatory, I analyzed it, and I noticed at once that there were some incoherences between the picture and the testimony
J : which incoherences?
PM: for instance the witness describes the lights as points whereas when we look at the size of picture on the film roll and when we listen to his description of the size of the object, it's clear that each light had the minimum size of the full moon. So if you have an object with the size of the full moon you don't say that it's a point. Moreover, the two witnesses had slightly contradictory versions on the departure of the object. One was saying that the object has disappeared suddenly, the other that it went by slowly. So there were some incoherences between the testimonies that made us already suspect that it was a hoax.
J: AM, the documents in question had also been analyzed by the NASA, it went very far, what did the NASA think about it?
AM: for myself, I don't know anything about the NASA, but there are 4 or 5 photography experts that examined it. It's true that my colleague [referring to PM] made a trial to reproduce something similar, others also, but each time we could see very quickly that it was a fake but not for the original. So now for the problem you raised, I know now that there were small lamps which made him speaks of luminous points and that it was photographed, now I know, at 1,5 m of distance.
J: So you have the technical details that you needed.
AM: I must search as for the ufo phenomenon, because if there's an enigma we must try to resolve it.
J: PM, the NASA leaned over the phenomenon? what were their conclusions?
PM: I'm not aware of an official extensive analysis by the NASA, it was a hearsay. My staff, who is in astrophysics and image treatment, we analyzed this picture without the original but nonetheless with a copy. We confronted it to the testimony. I think the main error that was made by many labs who analyzed the picture is that they looked at the picture outside its context. We can't, on the solely basis of a picture, unless it is an evident hoax, determine if it is a hoax, in taking it outside of the context in which it was captured. We must compare it with the testimony of the photographer, with the testimony of his girlfriend, and that's here that on one part we saw it was very easy to reproduce the object with a model, so we could not exclude the idea of a hoax and on another part we noticed some incoherences. It was not a document that could be considered as genuine.
the journalist continue with questions of some telespectator (I will post the rest later)
, actually I listen to the video online but I can pause each time I need to write with the online media player (too difficult for me to translate online!), so I don't need a copy of the video, but thanks for your help.