EchoEvent 2023: a new era for the Study of UAP in Europa has just begun at the Sorbonne University in Paris.

Round Table with Vinnie Adams, Jacques Vallée, Christopher Mellon, Christiaan Van Heijst and Philippe Guillemant

Save the date: November 4, 2023. It was the opening day of the first European Congress for UAP Studies and Research (Echo Event), held in Paris and entirely dedicated to the scientific study of the UAP phenomenon. The two-day event took place at the Sorbonne, one of the oldest universities in the world (founded in 1257), which agreed to host a panel of highly respected international experts: from the astrophysicist and computer scientist Jacques Vallée to Harvard astronomer Avi Loeb, from the former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Intelligence in the United States during the Clinton and George W. Bush administrations, Christopher Mellon, to the physicist and engineering researcher at the CNRS Philippe Guillemant, and with important contributions and round tables involving lots of very important guests such as 747 pilot Christiaan Van Heijst and Michael Vaillant, who worked at GEIPAN (part of the French space agency CNES) for 15 years.

A high profile panel for an event that was made possible thanks to the commitment of the tireless Sarah Witeneim and Deïmian, supported by UAP researcher and podcaster, Vinnie Adams from Disclosure Team and UAP Media UK.

We, at UAP Education, wanted to be there, choosing this very occasion to formally launch our activities and recognizing in the Echo Event the same values and objectives at the core of our project: reduce the stigma around the topic to allow scholars, academics and researchers from different disciplines to approach it with no fear of ridicule and career damage in order to actively contribute to the research of a phenomenon that concerns the whole humanity, to the point of being able to mark a turning point in our evolution.

“Choosing the Sorbonne is part of the message - Sarah Witeneim confirmed to us - first of all because it is a center of universal knowledge, whose prestige we hope will contribute to, at least, partially evaporating the stigma surrounding the topic”.

The Sorbonne thus enters the group of a still limited list of universities that have seriously approached the UAP topic, such as Harvard - where Avi Loeb works - and we hope that this event could be a beacon capable of guiding other European institutions in allowing their researchers to take part in studies relating to UAPs”.

“I think this was one of the most prestigious events I’ve attended- confirms Vinnie Adams, who superbly hosted most of the events on stage, often interacting with the various guests and favoring (as in his style) a fluid and open channel with the public that showed up in such large numbers. The Echo Event was already sold out several weeks before its occurrence - and having 500 people enter the University to learn about a topic like this is certainly a sign that this is an a historical moment.

Full House at the Sorbonne for the Echo Event

The fact that this was an historical moment was also confirmed by Christopher Mellon who, opening the conference, underlined how on one hand, science confirms that life in the universe is not only possible but also very likely and very close to us (11,000 habitable planets within a radius of 326 light years and, at just 150 years from us, K2-12B proved to have molecules of life on the ground), and on the other hand, the number of UAP reports is increasing: cases in the US only have risen from 144 in 2021 to well over 800 this year.

We owe Christopher Mellon all we have achieved so far in terms of UAP transparency: he was the one responsible for the beginning of the process by delivering the three famous videos of the American Navy to the New York Times in 2017 which led to the game-changing article co-authored by Leslie Kean and Ralph Blumenthal. However, when asked about a possible timing for disclosure - that is, the admission by his government of the true nature of the UAP phenomenon - Mellon was more cautious: "We didn't have a plan when we delivered the videos, but we didn't expect that they could lead to where we are today. However, we are talking about the political side of the “disclosure” issue, which is always influenced by the administrations that are in power, the duration of which is five years.” It is understood that at the end of each administration everything can change, in one sense or another, and the Biden administration is coming to an end.

Jacques Vallée, great protagonist of the event - both for his long and prestigious career and for representing his native land (he now lives in California) - underlined the need for scientists to step forward: ”The stigma around the topic in France has been a problem. We need people with a diploma, a degree who then dedicate themselves to study the phenomenon. This will take at least 20 years, and that’s why we have to start now.” During the same round table Mellon recalled a recent event to show the magnitude of the stigma still going on today, specifically, when NASA initially refused to reveal the name of the new director of their UAP Study Panel for fear of reprisals of the scientific community itself! And all of this took place during the same press conference where Bill Nelson, current director of NASA, had repeatedly underlined the necessity and urgency of removing the stigma around the topic and how Nasa was pioneering in that effort.

Boeing pilot Christiaan Van Heijst, who, since 2021, became an outspoken voice on the topic, talked about his own UAP sightings (one of which was documented by photos) and how his coming forward encouraged many other private pilots to tell him about their own experience and, in some cases, to make their stories public. He echoed the words of the first guests: “Of course there is stigma! It is often a self-imposed stigma, which presents itself as a blanket of shame and manifests as the fear of revealing oneself. It is sad. You don't know what relief many of my colleagues feel after telling me their experiences... some even cry liberatingly. These are exciting moments." Christiaan reminded us that “there is no reporting channels or protocols for civilian pilots encountering UAPs, while there is one for safety systems. This way the stigma that gets created is of a cultural nature.”

Who, on the contrary, seems not to have been restrained by stigma is the well-known astrophysicist, Avi Loeb (selected in 2012 by Time as one of the 25 most influential people in Space Studies), who connected via video call with the room to present the Galileo Project and his studies on phenomena involving interstellar objects.

Three events have occurred since 2014: two with anomalous characteristics and one with parameters compatible with known objects (Borisov's comet). The first two are the famous Oumuamua which Loeb thinks could be an alien artifact, while the second object was classified as "IM1" and impacted Earth in 2014, showing some anomalous behaviour not immediately attributable to a common meteor event, primarily speed, changing along the journey. Avi Loeb raised $1.5 million for an initial expedition off Papua New Guinea to collect material released by the impact of IM1. And he succeeded! In Paris he presented to the audience the first results on these microspherules (about 500 of them with an average diameter of half a millimeter) collected on the seabed during a six-day expedition. The analysis of the objects shows non-terrestrial iron isotopes and ratios of some components (he mentioned Beryllium and Uranium) up to 100 times higher than those normally recorded on terrestrial rocks and NASA’s database of objects from Space.

Loeb rightly highlighted not only the difficulties he encountered in getting his articles on the topic published and peer-reviewed, but above all the potential points of failure of the mission in Papua. Doing science means taking risks. His words are a message for all scientists of today and tomorrow: fear of failure should not keep them away from researching UAP. On the contrary, they should be triggered by the pleasure of discovery, governed as always by the tireless engine of curiosity. Whatever the result, each failure would help science and humanity to advance and make the next colleague aware of what was already attempted with no success.

Loeb closed by announcing that he is working on a software to identify interstellar objects and, once ready, he expects it to be able to detect one object of this category every two weeks!

During the two-day Echo Event, the speakers shared a lot of data for the public in the room (such as those relating to the quantity and quality of the sightings collected, presented by Luc Dini - who included an exhaustive list of study groups active in all 5 continents - as well as those presented by Michael Vaillant who is working on a new software to analyze thousands of registered of cases in search of a recognizable pattern), together with presenting hypothesis to explain the phenomenon: extraterrestrial, multidimensional or multi-temporal presences, whose manifestation may have effects on the consciousness and physique of those exposed to them.

​The Swiss researcher Patrice Bonvin superbly outlined the recent history of studies on UAPs, focusing on United States, thus helping the audience to grasp the connection with the Manhattan Project, which began more than 70 years ago with approximately 200 thousand people involved in what is considered as the most famous American "Black Projects”, a term used to describe projects with the highest level of secrecy and whose fundingas do not have to be reported in detail to the tax payers. The Manhattan Project is double-linked both to the development of the H bomb and the UFO files, which share the same level of secrecy: a connection between the two is also corroborated by the high number of UAP sightings near nuclear installations. Michael Vaillant showed several maps as proof of the fact that the number of sightings in France, for decades, has skyrocketed in the vicinity of nuclear power plants or military bases with atomic weapons.

Philippe Guillemant also captured the audience by sharing his work as a physicist and researcher at the French CNES, presenting Wojciech H. Zurek's research on quantum decoherence applied to the study of UAPs. (Zurek presented the theory in 2002 with this article available online).

The theory of decoherence states that all existing physical systems are inherently quantum and that a loss of information occurs in the interaction between macroscopic systems. If the UAP phenomenon were able to act in the state of decoherence, this would explain many, if not all, of the characteristics of the phenomenon: no noise, time dilation in the observing subjects, perception of different spaces (e.g. inside and outside the UAP). In other words, UAPs would move outside of space-time and therefore outside the laws of gravity, which is determined by the latter. And it is decoherence that updates reality, through our brain. To further simplify, we could say that our perception of reality depends on a setting that can be modified. When this occurs, time expands and, therefore, we enter a differently perceived reality, in which most of the experienced events during a UAP sighting which are commonly and constantly reported would be normal and explicable: places around the witnesses that appear as deserted, car engines that stop, voices and sound that get distorted, movements forward or backward in time or space… Ultimately, the study of UAPs can open us up to a new physics, with notable implications for the well-being of humanity.

Jacques Vallée himself, in his speeches on stage, was keen to underline how the so-called disclosure process does not and should not only depends on politicians. By interpreting his multiple interventions, we can only share his hope for Scientists to get more and more involved, adding a fundamental layer to the process of “disclosure” by preparing and educating people to grasp every detail of the phenomenon before it gets revealed politically and therefore, preventing the public for suffering a big ontological shock. Indeed, given the democratic nature of science, thanks to its contribution the whole disclosure process could prove even faster!

We want to end this brief review of the Echo Event 2023 with Jacques Vallée, certainly the most prestigious researcher in the world since 1960s, when he began his collaboration with Astronomer J. Allen Hynek, then director of Project Blue Book. Vallée’s speech was vibrant and full of inspiration for the audience. Not only did he share substantial data during the two days ("we could have 500,000 cases of sightings in the last few years alone"), but he also insisted on what doing science means. When he was part of a team of very high level researchers he had brought together during his time at Stanford (in a 1968 photo he showed you could also recognize Peter Andrew Sturrock, a British astrophysicist who continues to be interested in the phenomenon), he investigated many UFO cases, some of which were also included in the Project Blue Book. His team finally came up with an explanation for 90 or 95% of the cases. But once again he remembered how that remaining, unexplained 5% is the fundamental one. “Marie Curie,” Vallée recalled, “won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1911 for discovering radium and polonium, working a few steps from here, at the Sorbonne. And she succeeded in her intent because she processed 2% of the waste material obtained from the rocks that she had brought to the laboratory. 2%... and it was that 2% which changed the world."

There are no better words to close this article and refer to the video interviews conducted with some of the speakers during the event that we just published on our Instagram and YouTube channels.

Massimo Frera