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France Opens X-Files
Fifty years after Charles de Gaulle opened an enquiry into Unidentified Flying Objects over France, the government's Space Research Department has made its files public.
They are available from the National Centre for Space Research site, here. You might want to give it a day or two. Such is the demand for information on OVNIs (UFOs), the site has crashed all morning.
The GEIPAN (Groupement pour l’Etude et l’Information sur les Phénomènes Aérospatiaux Non Identifiés) has thirty years of files on 1,600 UFOs covering 100,000 pages. According to its records, 9 percent of cases can be explained perfectly well, 33 percent can probably be explained away, while 28 percent of sightings remain unexplained.
These are graded as "Type D" phenomena: "despite good or very good data and credible witnesses, we are confronted with something we can't explain", says GEIPAN's boss.
Jacques Patenet, who heads the department, describes the publishing as "a world first", claiming France is the first country to make all its files on UFO activity public (though only part of the archive goes on line this week: The rest will be introduced progressively in the following months).
French newspaper Le Figaro looks at a few cases, including the famous Royan Cylinder. Investigators in 1985 found it didn't correspondent to any known missile, and later concluded it was part of a US satellite. Only later was it found to be part of a German weapon from the Second World War.
More bizarre is the 1967 Close Encounter of the Third Kind (RR3) between two children and four little black creatures who emerged from a sphere near the village of Cussac. The witnesses described scents of sulphur and investigators found their accounts held up after more than a decade: The 1978 report concluded there was no rational explanation for the event, and that "unknown technology" seemed to be at work.
UFO hunters also investigated the Trans-en-Provence Saucer, a 2.5m disc which left scorch marks containing traces of "iron, iron oxide, phosphates and zinc" on the ground in 1981. In 1994, the crew of a flight between Nice and London spotted a huge red disc in the air above the Paris region. Radar traces were later found for the object, but investigators were unable to come to any conclusions about its origins.
