Alain Juillet, former director of the French Republic’s Foreign Intelligence Service (DGSE), is one of the first people in authority to speak openly about the UFO phenomenon and the existence of alien life.

With extensive experience in intelligence, he advocated a pragmatic approach and an open mind to solving a mystery too important to be at the mercy of only people who believe in it and skeptics.

Alain Juillet served as the head of the Directorate General of External Security, which is akin to the CIA in the United States, between 2002 and 2003 as well as the Senior Head of Economic Intelligence for the French Prime Minister for the following six years.

Although he had previously not publicly spoken about the UFO phenomenon, the former high-ranking official discussed the enigma in a new French documentary on the subject.

In an interview with Paris Match, Juillet spoke about his appearance in the documentary UFOs: A Matter of States.

Dominique Filhol, the documentary’s director, focused on the puzzling nature of the phenomenon in the film—recognizing the subject’s otherness without making any firm conclusions regarding its nature.

The former director of France’s foreign intelligence agency Alain Juillet

“There is a term which recurs more and more often among specialists in the subject; it is the idea of ‘non-human intelligence.’ This term is interesting because it does not reject the extraterrestrial hypothesis but it does include other theories as to the nature of the phenomenon,” Filhol said.

“The phenomenon has become palpable. I had the chance to be able to film a meeting of the members of the SIGMA 2 commission which studies UFOs in a rigorous and scientific manner or to meet Senator Harry Reid at the origin of the [Advanced Aviation Threat Identification Program (AATIP)] research program on UFOs in the department of American Defense. All these interviews confirmed my intuitions.”

“There is also a current of ufology which studies the links between consciousness and the UFO phenomenon and this is a point that we tackle in the film,” he added. “For more and more researchers, in the case of close encounters, the phenomenon seems to interact with the consciousness of the witnesses.

“This is also what certain fighter pilots of the U.S. Navy who observed these phenomena have related: these objects seemed to anticipate the reactions of the pilots, as if they were able to read their minds.”

In the interview, Juillet agreed with Filhol’s serious acknowledgment of the UFO subject.

“I am originally an intelligence man and when we see things that are inexplicable today, we know that we can explain them tomorrow. It’s just that we don’t have the elements to imagine or understand what’s going on.

“In the particular field of UFOs, not to mention the people who see a flying saucer landing in a field, there are fighter pilots, astronauts, people who are anything but funny and report very precise observations. We must not say that they are nonsense but just recognize that there are things that escape us,” he said of his interest in UFOs.

Juillet said that in the film he speaks to “another aspect…which has been explained by others much stronger than me in the matter: we pass from a vision of the world modeled by traditional physics to another vision based on quantum physics. And we understand these phenomena much better through the prism of quantum physics than with that of current physics.”

The UFO phenomenon might also be in some ways reliant on our perception, he said.

“A fly with its faceted eyes can see dimensions other than ours even though it lives in our world,” Juillet explained. “Perhaps there are therefore things that are in our universe, but that we cannot see in normal times because they are not in our field of vision.

“But perhaps, from time to time, something happens, that a phenomenon passes through our field of perception before disappearing. I’m not talking about ‘little green men’ there. I rather have the impression that I am following the same approach as certain scientists and astronomers who simply say to themselves ‘something escapes us.’”

Ultimately, said Juillet, the secrecy surrounding UFOs isn’t really useful.

“I don’t think secrecy is really useful, unless we discover disturbing things,” he said. “But we note that the phenomenon has not manifested, until now, an aggressive intention. So, there is no reason to worry, we are not in a horror film […]

“However, I do not think it is necessary to talk about it too much because many people will get involved to fantasize at all costs! If we say ‘UFOs are perhaps a reality’ or if we evoke the advances in quantum physics, we will hear ourselves answer ‘oh the poor man, he has gone mad.’ As we get out of the classic relationship that people have with science, it may not pass.

“And there is obviously the possibility that gurus will take up the question and say anything. You shouldn’t over-promote all of this but try to stay scientific and say to yourself: there is something, that is indisputable.”

And if the UFO phenomenon does become widely accepted, Juillet said he thinks that “people adapt very well. If tomorrow morning, we have confirmation that the UFOs come from a world parallel to ours, and well everyone will say ‘well, there, there is a parallel world.’ The day we say it, within five years, everyone will have accepted it as a trivial phenomenon.”