Ummo

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Ummo is a blanket term to describe a series of decades-long claims that aliens from the planet Ummo were communicating with persons on the earth. Most Ummo information was in the form of many detailed documents and letters sent to various esoteric groups or UFO enthusiasts. The Ummo affair was subject to much mainstream attention in France and Spain during the 1960's and 1970's, and a degree of interest remains regarding the subject.

General consensus is that the entire affair was an elaborate hoax. The culprit (or culprits) is unknown, but a Jose Luis Jordan Pena has claimed responsibility for instigating the Ummo affair. [link]

However, some contend there may be at least a measure truth in the matter, and there are a few small groups of devotees, such as "a strange Bolivian cult called the Daughters of Ummo" [link]. Regardless of any ultimate explanation, the Ummo affair is one of the most intriguing (and most detailed) UFO-related events in recent decades. Dr. Jacques Vallee has said the Ummo documents might be a real-world analogue of the fictional creators of Borges' "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius".

Contents

1 History
2 The documents' contents
3 Hypotheses and Proposed Explanations
4 See also
5 Sources
6 External links

History

Mike Dash writes that the Ummo affair began on February 6, 1966, in Madrid. On that day, Jordan Peña reported a close encounter of the first kind when he saw "an enormous circular object with three legs and, on its underside, a curious symbol: three vertical lines joined by a horizontal bar. The two exterior lines curved outward at the edges, which made the pictogram resemble the alchemical sign for the planet Uranus." (Dash, 299)

Peña's report generated a fair amount of excitement, but it was only the beginning. Not long afterwards, a Madrid author of a UFO book received several photographs in an anonymous mailing. The photos were of a craft similar to the one reported by Peña, and bearing the same symbol.

Within a few weeks, "a leading Spanish contactee named Fernando Sesma became involved when he began receiving lengthy, typewritten documents which purported to come from a spacefaring race called the Ummites." (Dash, 299)

Within the year, various persons (mostly in Madrid) received about 150 Ummite documents, totaling over 1000 pages. Every single page of Ummite documents was stamped with the same symbol of three linked lines. New Ummite documents would continue surfacing for many subsequent years. Many others have received Ummo letters, including French scientist Jean-Pierre Petit, a researcher at the CNRS.

In the letters, the Ummites relate their story and claim to have landed on Earth in March 1950 in the southern French département of Alpes-de-Haute-Provence, in the area of Digne-les-Bains. Reports mention three spacecraft with some explorers coming from their planet. They describe how they found our planet, their arrival on Earth, analysis of our habits, their language, and scientific descriptions of their activities.

In June 2003, a scientist with the pseudonym Jean Pollion released, in French, his book Ummo, de vrais extraterrestres, or, Ummo, real extraterrestrials in which he analyses the "Ummite" thoughts and language. Currently, more than 1300 pages of those letters have been registered, but it is possible that many other letters exist. In a 1988 letter, reference is made to the existence of 3850 pages, copies of which having been sent to several individuals, represent perhaps up to 160,000 pages of total Ummo documents.

The true identity of the authors of those reports remains unknown.

Dash notes that "few ufologists outside Spain took the affair seriously--the photographic evidence was highly suspect, and, while the Ummite letters were more sophisticated than most contactee communication, there was nothing in them that could not have originated on Earth." Still, Dash allows that, whatever their origins, "considerable effort had gone into the supposed hoax." (Dash, 299)

The documents' contents

The Ummites write that they first visited Earth in 1950 as a small group of scientist-explorers. Their goals were the study of our biosphere, atmosphere and culture. They explain how they discovered the Earth by chance, thanks to a Morse radio message sent by a Norwegian ship 15 years prior to their landing, and also describe scientific data from their planetary system, including its gravity, orbit, revolution period, sizes, and information about their star.

The Ummites were amazed, seeing our multi-cultural society, and also the social disorder so prevalent on Earth. They explain their civilization is older than ours, with appropriately advanced technology, and they will not disturb our social evolution.

About fifteen letters describe living conditions on their planet in painstaking detail, with many pictures. They give their society the term "social network" and explain that it is an enormous and dynamic network, where each person is a knot, and each relationship between people is a dynamic arc. In this way they describe their daily life: their housing, the importance of perfumes to their culture, their supply network, their cooking and food, work, games, family, their mode of transport, sex, their education system, psychology, marriage, arts, "the concept of God", their history, different governmental steps they have known, and the discovery of other planets having life. Dash notes that the letters discuss social issues "from a noticeably left-wing stance.")

Philosophy and "the concept of God" are strongly featured in the Ummo letters. Several letters are devoted entirely to these subjects. Also mentioned are Ummites' morals, ethics, human being's free will, man's role in the universe, the end of existence, the soul, the collective unconscious (or collective soul as the Ummites call it). In several letters the Ummites discuss Earth's problems, including abortion, the oppression of women by men, and problems they see in our education and political systems.

Many scientific subjects are described in detail, including network theory (or graph theory), astrophysics or cosmology), the unified field theory , biology, and evolution. Some of this information is dubious pseudoscience, but some of it is alleged to be accurate. Presuming some of this specialised knowledge is accurate, it has been suggested that a group of university students may be involved in an elaborate, extended prank by writing the Ummo letters.

Hypotheses and Proposed Explanations

Several hypotheses about the real authors have been offered:

It's been proposed that the Ummo affair is genuinely what it claims: Communication from extraterrestrials.

Some people think some class of secret service, such as the CIA or KGB, may be responsible, but their motivations and aims are unknown, and no proof of such a scheme has been presented.

Dash notes that some suspect that the Ummite material was "an attempt by a socialist group to publish radical material that could not otherwise appear under General Franco's dictatorship. (Dash, 300)

Others suspect one or several religious sects, but the Ummo authors do not, in any letters, at any time, suggest that their beliefs become the foundation of any "rite", or worship. Nowhere in those documents can you find an incitement to such activities.

The most popular hypothesis, however, seems to be that the entire affair is an elaborate hoax, perhaps perpetrated by a student group composed of scientists and philosophers. As noted above, a Jose Luis Jordan Pena claimed in 1992 that he had instigated the Ummo affair, but people who have met him say that he does not have a sufficient background to have authored the texts.

Sources

Mike Dash, Borderlands: The Ultimate Exploration of the Unknown

External links