Great Oil Sniffer Hoax

The company spent millions of dollars developing a new gravity wave-based oil detection system, which was later revealed to be a scam.

A friend of Violet's, Italian industrialist Carlo Pesenti, showed more interest and agreed to start funding early development.

[2] 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).

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.

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.

Such an obvious oversight on the part of the officials might sound odd, but writers have commented on a sort of political chauvinism that surrounded the project.

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.

[3] France's president, Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, was told of the devices in June 1976 and was aware of the development contracts being given to de Villegas' Fisalma.

Four months later the new prime minister, Raymond Barre, learned of devices when his signature was required to waive various currency restrictions in order to transfer the funds abroad to the company's Swiss bank account.

His Elf contacts, however, remained confident in spite of the failures, and happily continued to provide Bonassoli with documentation of previous studies of the fields that were due to be flown over in the tests.

[4] In May 1979 he arranged for Jules Horowitz, chief of research and development for France's atomic energy agency, to visit the lab and examine "Omega".

Bonassoli attempted to deflect all criticism by stating that the entire secret of the device was one key component, which was locked in a box that he refused to open.

The same week Pierre Péan published a complete history of the story in the satirical magazine Le Canard Enchaîné, apparently tipped off by government insiders.

Giscard d'Estaing responded on television, brandishing another copy of the report which he had in his own possession, and claiming that its existence proved that the entire affair was simply a case of political manoeuvring.

In January 1984, Bonassoli held a press conference in Italy, claiming that he would hand over all the data on his machine to the Italian National Research Council (CNR).