 This image of an alleged extraterrestrial event, or of a natural
phenomenon linked to lightning, was among 1,600 files posted on the
French space agency's Web site.
source MSNBC
by John Leicester
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” — 100,000 documents on supposed UFOs and sightings of
other unexplained phenomena that the French space agency is publishing
on the Internet.
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 about 1,650 cases on record and 6,000 witness
accounts.
The
space agency, known by its French initials CNES, said it is making the
documents public because it wanted 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.
28 percent of cases are ‘inexplicable’
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.
About 8 feet (2.5 meters) 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.
Everything published, even the frauds
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.
Burning object explained
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.”
you may watch videos here:
MSNBC
Associated Press writer Angela Doland in Paris contributed to this report.
© 2007 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
source MSNBC
March 23, 2007
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