French astrophysicist, born 19 February 1936, and a career engineer at CNES, the French space agency, where he headed the Sounding Rockets Division from 1969 and the Scientific Systems and Projects Division from 1976. In May 1977 CNES announced GEPAN, the state group for the study of unidentified aerospace phenomena, with Poher as its founder and first director, the first arrangement of its kind inside a national space agency.
He is in this wiki for two things. He is among the working scientists named as members of the network in the foreword to The Invisible College, the people who studied the phenomenon privately because doing so publicly ended careers. And in January 1975 he and Jacques Vallee presented “Basic Patterns in UFO Observations” to the AIAA’s 13th Aerospace Sciences Meeting in Pasadena, a statistical treatment of sighting catalogues that is one of the earliest attempts to put the data on a quantitative footing, and the technical work standing immediately behind the book.
Connections
Jacques Vallee · The Invisible College · Control System Hypothesis