The Weinstein conjecture in the presence of submanifolds having a Legendrian foliation

Helmut Hofer introduced in '93 a novel technique based on holomorphic curves to prove the Weinstein conjecture. Among the cases where these methods apply are all contact 3–manifolds $(M,\xi )$ with ${\pi }_2(M)\mathrm{\ne }0$. We modify Hofer’s argument to prove the Weinstein conjecture for some examples of higher dimensional contact manifolds. In particular, we are able to show that the connected sum with a real projective space always has a closed contractible Reeb orbit.