Aime Michel§

French author and investigator, 1919 to 1992, whose two contributions to the field pull in opposite directions.

The first is orthoteny, the thesis set out in Mystérieux Objets Célestes (1958) that genuine sightings on a given day fall along straight lines on the map, which would separate real cases from misidentifications. It was tested and did not survive: Donald Menzel showed in Flying Saucer Review in 1965 that the observed alignments matched chance expectation, Jacques Vallee reached the same conclusion independently in the early 1960s, and Michel eventually accepted that the trail was false. It is one of the few falsified hypotheses in this literature with a clean record of its own refutation.

The second is the Dr. X Case 1968, which he investigated and published in Flying Saucer Review in 1969 with a follow-up in 1971, both translated by Gordon Creighton. That report is the source for the medical centrepiece of The Invisible College, and it is the reason a single anonymous French physician is still argued about half a century later.

Connections§

Dr. X Case 1968 · Jacques Vallee · The Invisible College · Flying Saucer Review