French get a look at nation’s UFO files

By John Leicester

updated 8:48 p.m. ET March 23, 2007

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.

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