Jean Dommanget died on October 1, 2014 at the age of 90. He was an astronomer and head of the Département “Astrométrie et Dynamique des corps célestes” at the Royal Observatory of Belgium. He was an internationally acknowledged specialist in the domain of double stars. Jean Dommanget joined the Comité PARA in 1960. He immediately took a significant part in its activities, in particular when the “Signal du Sourcier (Prof. Yves Rocard)” and “l’effet Mars (Michel Gauquelin)” were investigated by the committee. Jean Dommanget had been President of the Comité PARA from 1980 to 2007. He took care from then until 2009 of the drafting of the “Nouvelles Brèves”, an annual publication of the committee. It was at his initiative that a book entitled “La Science face au défi du paranormal” has been edited to celebrate the 50th birthday of the committee. In this book, of which he wrote several chapters, are in particular pointed out the history of the committee, the experiments it realized and the beliefs in paranormal to which it is interested. He gave plenty of lectures about astrology and others subjects and participated in several TV shows battling against supporters of the paranormal. He made frequent interventions in the media to denounce the false claims of the paranormal.
Jean Dommanget resigned the presidency at the end of 2007 and became Vice President for 3 years. After this term he ceased his activities within the committee to devote himself to the concretization of research on the orbits of double stars undertaken fifty years earlier at the Observatory.
Jean Dommanget was an affable, competent, enterprising and firm man who devoted himself for more than thirty years to defend reason and to allow the Comité PARA to achieve its mission. We will not forget him.