The Triangle

Issue date: 7/14/06 Section: Sci-Tech

Media Credit: quanthomme.free.fr

I've done some pretty damnable things in my day. Things forbidden by the Bible, such as eating oysters, trimming the hair at my temples, and wearing makeup (for a high school play). Yet I have great faith that when I reach the pearly gates, St. Peter will look down on me and say, "Well, you're not Eric Julien, so you couldn't have been that bad. Go on in."

Eric Julien is the pseudonym of one Jean Ederman, a French citizen and fearmonger. In April, he predicted that a fragment from a comet would land in the Atlantic Ocean on May 25, causing a mega-tsunami that would obliterate the coastlines of dozens of countries, including the United States and Morocco. The fragment of the comet was created by an alien civilization that knew it would strike the earth.

So some nutcase predicted the world was going to end. What's the harm in that? For starters, he did a pretty thorough job of screwing over the countries with coastlines on the Atlantic. In Morocco, Abdul Muhib's elementary school students came to him, asking "This guy is predicting a 200-meter tsunami is going to hit Morocco. Should we not come to school?" Okay, so some children didn't come to school one day. That's not so bad, is it?

Mustafa Jana, the head of the Moroccan Meteorological Office, had to go on national news to tell people that there was no threat of a tsunami. NASA even got dragged into it, working to prove that there was no reason to be afraid.

Some stuffy men in suits had to go on TV. Big deal. But that's only a taste of the panic that was created by this numskull. His tsunami predictions caused such terror that the inhabitants of costal areas in several North African countries abandoned their homes and fled toward higher ground, anxiously awaiting the destruction slated for the 25th. People in countries as far removed as Cost Rica began preparing shelters to receive the wounded and hoarding supplies.

That's the age we live in. One nut with a Web site can cause a panic that disrupts the lives of many thousands of people, cause untold headaches for governments, and suck unimaginable sums of money out of economies.

Eric Julien claims that, when he worked as a military air traffic controller for the French government, he tracked a UFO traveling at about 17,000 mph. He later claimed that the inhabitants of this UFO contacted him and took him aboard their spaceship so as to teach him how to operate it. The police began looking into the circumstances surrounding this "disappearance," and it turned out that he had returned to his home island of Reunion, despite telling everyone he'd be in outer space. A thoroughly terrestrial explanation to a preposterous claim.

Continued...

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