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PARIS. France has become the first country to open all of its 1,600 once-secret files on UFOs (known as OVNIs in French) to the public. Instead of responding only to requests about specific reports under freedom of information legislation, as a few other Western countries do, France’s National Centre for Space Studies has decided to make everything available on a dedicated website.

Interest has been so great that the website has become overloaded and is difficult to access. In going public, the French have also revealed that a quarter of their sightings, going back over 50 years, contain good data but remain unexplained.

The online archives of the Office for the Study of Unidentified Aerospace Phenomena, which was created in 1962 by President Charles de Gaulle, will be updated as new cases are reported. They currently contain 10,000 documents, including audiotapes, photographs and videos sent in by witnesses.

Jacques Patenet, the aeronautical engineer who heads the office for the study of “non-identified aerospatial phenomena”, says his unit “does not have the least proof that extra-terrestrials are behind the unexplained phenomena. But, it doesn’t demonstrate the impossibility of such presence either. The question remains open.”

Nearly 25 per cent are classified as “type D” which Patenet explains means that “despite good or very good data and credible witnesses, we are confronted with something we can’t explain.” And only nine per cent of its UFO cases have been “fully explained”. They include a sighting by 1,000 people reporting flashing lights in the sky on a November night in 1990. What they were witnessing was the burning up of rocket fragments falling back into the earth’s atmosphere.

Some of the reports on the new site are easy to dismiss. But others are from reliable observers, including police officers. Patenet’s predecessor, Jean-Jacques Velasco, had publicly stated that the unit had cases involving simultaneous eyewitness and radar sightings that confirmed the physical existence of UFOs.

The French UFO database can be accessed (when it is able to cope with the demand) at: www.cnes-geipan.fr

CAPTION: Our image shows a classic French UFO that is said to have been photographed by a medical doctor over Tavernes in 1974.

Posted on Monday, March 26, 2007
Category: UFOs

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