Great Oil Sniffer Hoax - Prior To Elf

Prior To Elf

In 1965, Belgian Count Alain de Villegas met and teamed up with Italian inventor, Aldo Bonassoli. Bonassoli was a telephone company electrician in Ventimiglia, Italy, who invented a new type of desalination system. De Villegas (who was an ecologist, anti-nuclear, and believed in flying saucers) was interested in the idea and later often said that "We can live without oil, but not without water." When the device proved not to work as expected, the team started work on a related concept, a "water sniffer." If they couldn't make clean water, perhaps they could find it.

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 they 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 pro-Europe anti-communist world, had formed the Pinay Circle in the 1950s around its titular leader, Antoine Pinay.

Violet was interested in the water sniffer, and agreed to attempt to arrange development funding. An attempt to interest Crosby Kelly in New York failed when Kelly stated he would only put up money if the device first proved itself able to work. A friend of Violet's, Carlo Pesenti, an Italian industrialist close to the Vatican, proved more interested 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 (today's UBS AG). Through contacts in Opus Dei, Violet arranged for Spain's tourist minister, Alfredo Sánchez Bella, to put several test sites in Spain at the team's disposal.

Although the tests found the sniffer to be unsuccessful, in the midst of drilling the Yom Kippur War 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 and were given government authorization to conduct tests over Zululand. Pesenti's engineers fitted one of the machines into a Douglas DC-3 for the surveys. A site claimed to be promising was identified and drilling began, but by the end of 1975 the costs had become so great that Pesenti opted out. The Zululand bore eventually bottomed out at 6,000 metres with a drill stem and no oil.