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Thursday, March 22, 2007

France opens secret UFO files covering 50 years

France became the first country to open its files on UFOs Thursday when the national space agency unveiled a website documenting more than 1,600 sightings spanning five decades.

The online archives, which will be updated as new cases are reported, catalogues in minute detail cases ranging from the easily dismissed to a handful that continue to perplex even hard-nosed scientists.

"It is a world first," said Jacques Patenet, the aeronautical engineer who heads the office for the study of "non-identified aerospatial phenomena."

Known as OVNIs in French, UFOs have always generated intense interest along with countless conspiracy theories about secretive government cover-ups of findings deemed too sensitive or alarming for public consumption.

Sightings -- in at least one case involving thousands of people across France -- and evidence such as burn marks and radar trackings showing flight patterns or accelerations that defy the laws of physics are taken very seriously.

Of the 1,600 cases registered since 1954, nearly 25 percent are classified as "type D", meaning that "despite good or very good data and credible witnesses, we are confronted with something we can't explain," Patenet said.

On January 8, 1981 outside the town of Trans-en-Provence in southern France, for example, a man working in a field reported hearing a strange whistling sound and seeing a saucer-like object about 2.5 meters (eight feet) in diameter land in his field about 50 meters (yards) away.

A dull-zinc grey, the saucer took off, he told police, almost immediately, leaving burn marks. Investigators took photos, and then collected and analyzed samples, and to this day no satisfactory explanation has been made.

Patenet's answer to questions about evidence of life beyond Earth was sure to inflame the suspicions of those convinced the government is holding back: "We do not have the least proof that extra-terrestrials are behind the unexplained phenomena."

But then he added: "Nor do we have the least proof that they aren't."

To visit the website: www.cnes-geipan.fr

Labels: disclosure, France, Jacques Patenet, Trans-en-Provence, UFO

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Thursday, January 04, 2007

French put UFO archives online

France's National Space Studies Centre (CNES) is to put its UFO archive online this spring.

A group within the organisation known as the Rare Aerospace Phenomena Study Department (SEPRA) has been collecting reports of UFO sightings and now has over 6,000 documents relating to "strange sightings".

Jacques Arnould, project leader at CNES, said that the organisation will put its whole archives online for world viewing by mid-February.

"Often the [sightings] are made to the Gendarmerie, which provides an official witness statement, and some come from airline pilots," Arnould told Reuters.

The reports cover some 1,200 UFO sightings within French national borders, and represent 30 years of investigations.

All names will be excised from the records before they go online to protect the privacy of the reporters.

Labels: CNES, France, Jacques Arnould, National Space Studies Centre, Rare Aerospace Phenomena Study Department, SEPRA, UFO, UFO archives