A letter from a woman in New York, who identified herself as a former spokesperson for rocket scientist Wernher von Braun, accompanied a French military study on unidentified flying objects that was recently made public. The document, titled “255_413270_UFO’s_and_Defense_What_Should_we_Prepare_For,” was released by the PURSUE archive on May 8, 2026, and is now hosted on the U.S. Department of War’s website at war.gov. The woman wrote to NASA from New York, enclosing a 1999 French military study on UFOs.
She said she used to be a spokesperson for Wernher von Braun, the Nazi rocket engineer who helped put Americans on the moon. That letter, and the report it accompanied, sat in government files for 27 years before the PURSUE archive released them last week.
The core text of the released file is not a U.S. intelligence assessment but a French study. It was published in the July 1999 issue of the magazine VSD by the Institute of Higher Studies for National Defence, a French state institution. The work is known as the COMETA report, named after a French association that studied aerial phenomena.
Andre Lebeau, former chairman of the French National Center for Space Studies (CNES), wrote the report’s foreword. Lebeau opened with a blunt diagnosis of the scientific community’s attitude.
He wrote that it is “not looked on highly in certain scientific circles to be preoccupied with phenomena that are deemed to come under the heading of popular mythology.” He then drew a parallel to meteorites. For centuries, stones falling from the sky were dismissed as peasant superstition. Scientists refused to study them. Then in 1803, a shower of meteorites fell over the town of Laigle in Normandy.
The French Academy of Sciences sent a young physicist named Jean-Baptiste Biot to investigate. He collected samples, interviewed witnesses, and published a report.
After Laigle, meteorites became a legitimate subject of science. Lebeau argued that the same threshold could apply to UFOs. When a phenomenon is “collectively and indisputably visible,” he wrote, it can become a scientific object, even if nobody yet understands what it is.
The COMETA report itself ran to several hundred pages. It examined cases of unidentified aerial phenomena observed by military pilots, radar operators, and civilian witnesses.
It considered the possibility that some of these objects were of non-human origin. It asked what France should do about it. The report landed in a specific political and institutional context.
France had a state agency for space, CNES, that already ran a UFO investigation unit called GEPAN, later renamed SEPRA. The Institute of Higher Studies for National Defence existed to think about strategic threats.
The COMETA group had access to both. The woman’s letter is a separate document in the same file. She identified herself as a former spokesperson for von Braun.
She told NASA she wanted to share the report because she believed the space agency should be more open about what it knew. She did not say whether von Braun had ever discussed UFOs with her.
The letter is personal, not official. It is addressed to no one in particular at NASA. The release of the file under the PURSUE archive on May 8, 2026, makes this material public for the first time.
The U.S. government did not commission the COMETA report. It did not endorse it.
It simply filed it away. Now anyone can read it. What matters here is not whether the report is right or wrong. What matters is that a French state institution produced a serious study of unidentified aerial phenomena, and that study was deemed worth keeping by the U.S. Department of War.
The woman who sent it thought it deserved attention. The people who filed it agreed.
For 27 years, it sat in a government server, a document about the unknown, waiting for someone to ask what we should prepare for.
