I am not ready to throw out his reputation on that possible misinterpretation.
I base my judgment of his UFO claims not on his reputation (i.e., what he had said) but rather on what he says: and what he says is untestable, purely speculative hogwash. As I said, faced with his opinion of the unworkability of one outrageous hypothesis (extraterrestrials), he simply propounds another one just as outrageous, only this time formulated to avoid his claimed pitfalls in the data -- yet just as unworkable, untestable, and unscientific. He simply widens the goalposts so wide that even a ball kicked by a blindfolded drunkard saturated in Novocaine from the waist down would still hit it.
And he makes the standard presumptions of incorporation by attribution all weird occurrences from time immemorial, and the circular assessment of technological prowess from the implications of the interpretations. None of that is the least scientific.
Let's look at his bibliography. His technical publications are few, lackluster, and pedestrian; they cease abruptly in the mid-1980s after only about 15 years in the field. No wonder he published more on the subject of UFOs than on the topics he was trained in, as well as writing science fiction in more vast volume. You'll have a hard time convincing me he is one of France's top minds on anything except UFOs.
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