Batist

France puts secret UFO archive on Web

By JOHN LEICESTER, Associated Press Writer Fri Mar 23, 5:13 PM ET

PARIS - The saucer-shaped object is said to have touched down in the south of France and then zoomed off. It left behind scorch marks and that haunting age-old question: Are we alone? This is just one of the cases from France's secret "X-Files" — some 100,000 documents on supposed UFOs and sightings of other unexplained phenomena that the French space agency is publishing on the Internet.
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France is the first country to put its entire weird sightings archive online, said Jacques Patenet, who heads the space agency's UFO cell — the Group for Study and Information on Unidentified Aerospace Phenomena.

Their oldest recorded sighting dates from 1937, Patenet told The Associated Press in an interview Friday. The first batch of archives went up on the agency's Web site this week, drawing a server-busting wave of traffic.

"The Web site exploded in two hours. We suspected that there was a certain amount of interest, but not to this extent," Patenet said.

The archive includes police and expert reports, witness sketches (some are childlike doodlings), maps, photos and video and audio recordings. In all, the archive has some 1,650 cases on record and about 6,000 witness accounts.

The space agency, known by its French initials CNES, said it is making them public to draw the scientific community's attention to unexplained cases and because their secrecy generated suspicions that officials were hiding something.

"There's always this impression of plots, of secrets, of wanting to hide things," Patenet said. "The great danger would be to leave the field open to sects and charlatans."

He said many cases were unexplained lights in the sky. "Only 20 to 30" could be classified as "Objet Volant Non Identifie" — UFOs that appeared to be physical objects, leaving "marks on the ground, radar images," he said.

Even Charles de Gaulle, France's wartime hero who became president, got the UFO bug.

"In 1954, there was a wave of sightings of phenomena in France, and it went up to the highest levels of state. Gen. de Gaulle himself assigned ... an aide and told him, 'Look into this for me, study it to see if something needs to be done,'" Patenet said.

That year, there were hundreds of sightings over several months, but generally there are 50 to 100 reported each year.

Only 9 percent of France's strange phenomena have been fully explained, the agency said. Experts found likely reasons for another 33 percent, and 30 percent could not be identified for lack of information.

Other cases were impossible to crack. The most baffling were labeled "Class D aerospace phenomena" — which the agency defines as "inexplicable despite precise testimonies and the (good) quality of material information gathered." Some 28 percent of sightings fall into this category.

Patenet singled out the January 1981 case of the saucer-shaped object that a witness said he saw land in Trans-en-Provence, a village inland from the French Riviera.

Some 8 feet across, the zinc-colored object made a whistling noise as it landed. The witness later drew a picture: It resembled a wok with a lid and legs.

"The machine stayed a few seconds on the ground and then left very quickly but it left marks that were analyzed and allowed us to determine that the ground had been heated up, that the object must have weighed several hundred kilos (pounds), and that surrounding plants underwent biological changes," said Patenet.

"So something really happened. It really defies analysis," he said.

The agency said everything in the archive would be published, except for psychological reports about witnesses and their names.

Most of the time, witnesses were sincere about what they saw, Patenet said.

"Very few look for publicity because they fear most of all that they will not be taken seriously."

Still, there were frauds.

In 1979, in Cergy-Pontoise outside Paris, a man showed up at a police station claiming his friend had been abducted by a UFO — a bright light that appeared on the road and swallowed up his car. Several days later, the man purportedly reappeared in a field, emerging out of a sphere of light.

Investigators went so far as to test the man's blood for signs that he had recently experienced weightlessness — and they found none. The agency labeled it a hoax.

Some cases took years to unravel. In 1985, two farmers near the Atlantic coastal city of Royan saw a burning object drop into a field nearby.

Experts initially concluded that it was part of the propulsion device of a recently launched satellite. Eventually they realized it was a piece of German World War II ordnance that spontaneously exploded four decades after the war.

Among the unexplained cases, one of the most perplexing concerned a 1994 Air France flight. While flying over the Paris region, the crew noticed a large brown-red disk hovering on the horizon and constantly changing shape. The case "has never been explained to this day, and leaves the door open to all possible hypotheses," the agency wrote.

So, do we have neighbors out there, after all?

"I don't have an answer to that," said Patenet. "Even if there is such a planet, given the size of the universe, what is the probability that two civilizations ... will meet or come across each other? I really don't know. It's very complicated. It's incalculable."

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Stabby

You post this but no link?

GuNn3rs14

les putains de francais!!

Machine Knight

Figures France would surrender this info....

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KeyserSoze

MODISS D'PUTESSSSSSSSSS

GuNn3rs14

LMAO^

Daisy

matz8916

These aliens must like their wine and baguettes et leurs croissant.

it would be cool if we had neighbors. maybe one day we can all gather and have a massive ssbm party, but I'm sure these creatures have the Wii 7.5 and PS12 and xbox4606.

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el3ctronight.blogspot.com

FAT2001

Matz, your Halo avy reminds me... If any other space age life form comes and see's us playing that game or any other game where you kill space aliens, we are screwed.

Anyway... It would be interesting to have a link of source, if any. If you could, please?

And why don't more country's open up and share more UFO info? What do they have to hide from us? Why hide anything at all - it's a big universe, who knows what the hell is out there, we may as well try and figure it out, right?

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Drunken Savior

Because a lot of UFOs could be government space planes/low orbit satellites we saw but can't identify? Just my guess.

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"Because most people think, "Life sucks, and then you die." I disagree. I think life sucks, then you get cancer. Then you go into chemotherapy. You lose all your hair, you feel bad about yourself. Then all of the sudden the cancer goes into remission. You look good you feel good, you're going great, and all of the sudden you have a stroke. You can't move your right side. And one day you step off the curb at 68th by Lincoln Center and bang, you get hit by a bus. And then, maybe, you die."

FAT2001

That's true... And then you get all the hillbillys who think they see flying saucers all the time...

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GuNn3rs14

aliens are everywhere

KeyserSoze

I really don't see any fairness in this at all. Am I supposed to read your mind? How should I know if I never got a warning?

Coconut

Doctor_Mango

So France kept a record of UFO's and decides to release it to the public? Why would they want to let the world know that they've even figured out how to surrender to extra-terrestrial life?

Daisy

KeyserSoze

Okay, I'll be sure to do that.

Keazu

I sense sarcasm, ban him

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