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Great Oil Sniffer Hoax
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Great Oil Sniffer Hoax
The Great Oil Sniffer Hoax was a 1979 scandal involving French oil company Elf Aquitaine. The company spent millions of dollars developing a new gravity wave-based oil detection system, which was later revealed to be a scam. Elf lost over $150 million in the hoax. In France, the scandal is known as the "Avions Renifleurs" ("Sniffer Planes").
Aldo Bonassoli, a telephone-company electrician in Ventimiglia in Italy, invented a new type of desalination system. In 1965, Belgian Count Alain de Villegas became interested in the idea and later said that "We can live without oil, but not without water." When the device did not work as expected, the team turned its attention to a related concept, a "water sniffer" that would find water.
De Villegas was also a member of the Pan-European Union, an anti-communist group headquartered in Brussels. Through contacts in this group, in 1969 he met Jean Violet, a lawyer who worked for the Service de Documentation Extérieure et de Contre-Espionnage (SDECE), the French intelligence agency. Violet, who was an influential behind-the-scenes player in the European anti-communist world, had formed the Pinay Circle in the 1950s around its titular leader, Antoine Pinay.
Violet expressed interest in the water sniffer and agreed to try to find development funding. An attempt to interest Crosby Kelly in New York failed when Kelly stated he would only put up the money if the device was first proven to work. A friend of Violet's, Italian industrialist Carlo Pesenti, showed more interest and agreed to start funding early development. A new company was formed in Switzerland: Fisalma, Inc. (registered in Panama), under the direction of Philippe de Weck, president of Union des Banques Suisses (later part of UBS AG from the 1990s). Through contacts in Opus Dei, Violet arranged for Spain's tourism minister, Alfredo Sánchez Bella, to put several test sites in Spain at the team's disposal.
The tests of the sniffer were unsuccessful. The Yom Kippur War of October 1973 broke out and oil prices quadrupled. De Villegas kept his project alive by announcing that the machines could also detect oil, persuading Pesenti to invest additional funds. Using contacts provided by Pinay, they flew their equipment to South Africa, where they gained government authorization to conduct tests over Zululand. Pesenti's engineers fitted one of the machines into a Douglas DC-3 for the surveys. By the end of 1975 Pesenti opted out due to costs. The Zululand bore eventually bottomed out at 6,000 meters with a drill stem and no oil.
Although the details remain unclear to this day, some time in 1976 de Villegas and Bonassoli were introduced to Elf officials, apparently through de Villegas or Violet's connections in the French intelligence services. Bonassoli explained that he had been tinkering with televisions when he hit upon the idea of building a gravity wave detector that could be used to detect masses underwater - not just oil, but submarines as well. He had developed these into two machines: "Delta" which was designed to detect oil reserves from the air and produced a paper report and "Omega" which mapped from a closer range and displayed its output on a TV screen. He was willing to demonstrate the devices, but only if there were no scientists present, claiming that they might steal his ideas. Information about the pair's invention quickly made its way up the French political hierarchy.
Despite the scientific problems that would have turned up had they been investigated, there is no record of anyone involved having attempted any sort of scientific due diligence. Nor is there any record of any sort of background check, which would have turned up the string of previous failures.
Writers have commented on a sort of political chauvinism that surrounded the project. At the time Elf was almost wholly controlled by the government, as were similar companies in other European nations and Canada. Unlike those companies, Elf had little crude oil supply of its own and few known deposits for future commercialization. Elf was in danger of losing its status as a producer, at some point becoming nothing more than another refiner. If the devices could find new sources of oil practically anywhere, as was being claimed, France might remain among the small family of oil-producing European nations. This possibility was so attractive that the officials involved overlooked any doubts that were expressed, while also keeping the project completely secret.
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Great Oil Sniffer Hoax
The Great Oil Sniffer Hoax was a 1979 scandal involving French oil company Elf Aquitaine. The company spent millions of dollars developing a new gravity wave-based oil detection system, which was later revealed to be a scam. Elf lost over $150 million in the hoax. In France, the scandal is known as the "Avions Renifleurs" ("Sniffer Planes").
Aldo Bonassoli, a telephone-company electrician in Ventimiglia in Italy, invented a new type of desalination system. In 1965, Belgian Count Alain de Villegas became interested in the idea and later said that "We can live without oil, but not without water." When the device did not work as expected, the team turned its attention to a related concept, a "water sniffer" that would find water.
De Villegas was also a member of the Pan-European Union, an anti-communist group headquartered in Brussels. Through contacts in this group, in 1969 he met Jean Violet, a lawyer who worked for the Service de Documentation Extérieure et de Contre-Espionnage (SDECE), the French intelligence agency. Violet, who was an influential behind-the-scenes player in the European anti-communist world, had formed the Pinay Circle in the 1950s around its titular leader, Antoine Pinay.
Violet expressed interest in the water sniffer and agreed to try to find development funding. An attempt to interest Crosby Kelly in New York failed when Kelly stated he would only put up the money if the device was first proven to work. A friend of Violet's, Italian industrialist Carlo Pesenti, showed more interest and agreed to start funding early development. A new company was formed in Switzerland: Fisalma, Inc. (registered in Panama), under the direction of Philippe de Weck, president of Union des Banques Suisses (later part of UBS AG from the 1990s). Through contacts in Opus Dei, Violet arranged for Spain's tourism minister, Alfredo Sánchez Bella, to put several test sites in Spain at the team's disposal.
The tests of the sniffer were unsuccessful. The Yom Kippur War of October 1973 broke out and oil prices quadrupled. De Villegas kept his project alive by announcing that the machines could also detect oil, persuading Pesenti to invest additional funds. Using contacts provided by Pinay, they flew their equipment to South Africa, where they gained government authorization to conduct tests over Zululand. Pesenti's engineers fitted one of the machines into a Douglas DC-3 for the surveys. By the end of 1975 Pesenti opted out due to costs. The Zululand bore eventually bottomed out at 6,000 meters with a drill stem and no oil.
Although the details remain unclear to this day, some time in 1976 de Villegas and Bonassoli were introduced to Elf officials, apparently through de Villegas or Violet's connections in the French intelligence services. Bonassoli explained that he had been tinkering with televisions when he hit upon the idea of building a gravity wave detector that could be used to detect masses underwater - not just oil, but submarines as well. He had developed these into two machines: "Delta" which was designed to detect oil reserves from the air and produced a paper report and "Omega" which mapped from a closer range and displayed its output on a TV screen. He was willing to demonstrate the devices, but only if there were no scientists present, claiming that they might steal his ideas. Information about the pair's invention quickly made its way up the French political hierarchy.
Despite the scientific problems that would have turned up had they been investigated, there is no record of anyone involved having attempted any sort of scientific due diligence. Nor is there any record of any sort of background check, which would have turned up the string of previous failures.
Writers have commented on a sort of political chauvinism that surrounded the project. At the time Elf was almost wholly controlled by the government, as were similar companies in other European nations and Canada. Unlike those companies, Elf had little crude oil supply of its own and few known deposits for future commercialization. Elf was in danger of losing its status as a producer, at some point becoming nothing more than another refiner. If the devices could find new sources of oil practically anywhere, as was being claimed, France might remain among the small family of oil-producing European nations. This possibility was so attractive that the officials involved overlooked any doubts that were expressed, while also keeping the project completely secret.
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