Aime Michel

Aime Michel was a French science writer and UFO researcher who produced some of the most analytically ambitious work of the 1950s. His 1958 book Flying Saucers and the Straight-Line Mystery introduced the concept of orthoteny: the theory that UFO sightings, when plotted on a map, fell along great circle lines. The idea generated intense debate and prompted other researchers to test the hypothesis with their own data.

Michel's earlier book, The Truth About Flying Saucers (1956), provided a systematic overview of French and European sighting reports at a time when most English-language UFO literature focused exclusively on American cases. He was among the first researchers to treat the 1954 French wave as a coherent dataset amenable to statistical analysis rather than as a collection of anecdotes.

He served as APRO's international representative in France, contributing reports and analysis to the APRO Bulletin throughout the late 1950s and 1960s. His correspondence with Jacques Vallee, who was then a young astronomy student, helped draw Vallee into UFO research.

Michel's orthoteny hypothesis was eventually challenged by statistical analyses showing that random point distributions could produce similar apparent alignments. He accepted these criticisms with intellectual honesty and shifted his focus to other aspects of the phenomenon. His broader contribution was methodological: he demonstrated that sighting data could be subjected to geographical and temporal pattern analysis, an approach that later researchers adopted with more sophisticated tools.

He continued writing about science, philosophy, and anomalous phenomena until his death in 1992.