From The Sunday Times
March 25, 2007
Spooky ...they start a UFO website, then it crashes
Matthew Campbell in Paris
THE first official government website in the world to document UFO
sightings has collapsed under a stampede by the public to gain access.
The National Centre for Space Studies, the French equivalent of Nasa,
opened the website on Thursday, unveiling an archive of documents
about hundreds of unidentified flying object sightings in France over
the past 50 years.
Such was the excitement and scramble to pick through this treasure
trove that the website was overloaded and "crashed".
The archive includes photographs, police records of interviews with
witnesses and even video recordings.
It covers cases ranging from the obviously ludicrous - there are
numerous sightings of little green men - to several that have stumped
even the most sceptical scientists.
"It is a world first," said Jacques Patenet, an aeronautics engineer
in charge of the space centre's "study of nonidentified aerospatial
phenomena".
Known as OVNIs in France, UFOs have always generated intense public
debate in Paris as well as conspiracy theories about American cover-
ups and findings considered too sensitive or too alarming for public
consumption.
"Cases such as the lady who reported seeing an object that looked like
a flying roll of toilet paper" were clearly not worth reporting, said
Patenet. But other incidents involving multiple witnesses have for
long been baffling the experts.
Of the 1,600 cases registered since 1954, almost a quarter are
classified as "D", meaning that "despite good or very good data and
credible witnesses, we are confronted with something we cannot
explain", said Patenet.
For example, in 1994 the crew of an Air France flight from Nice to
London saw a giant disk that seemed to keep changing shape and colour.
After a minute or so it disappeared.
On January 8, 1981, in southern France, a man working in a field
reported hearing a strange whistling sound. He saw a saucer-like
object about 8ft in diameter land in his field about 50 yards away.
The object took off almost immediately, leaving burn marks.
Investigators took photographs and collected and analysed samples, but
they have not been able to explain the phenomenon.
Nearly 1,000 witnesses said they saw flashing lights in the sky on
November 5, 1990, but this was just rocket fragments falling back into
the Earth's atmosphere.
Perhaps the best documented European incident involved the scrambling
of two Belgian air force jets in March, 1990, to investigate an
aircraft flying over the south of the country in a manner "outside the
normal performance envelope of any air-plane", as the chief of Belgian
air force operations described it afterwards.
The new French website, once reactivated, will be updated whenever
there is a new sighting, but experts in the field were doubtful that
the archive would shed any light on the mystery.
"It's useless," said Jean-Pierre Petit, a retired aerospace
researcher, referring to the archive. "It's just reports from the
gendarmes."
He said that the police had long ago been issued with equipment for
gathering chemical samples and that this had often been used. "What is
the result of that research? That is what we want to know."
It is not the first time that the French government has released
information about UFOs. In 1999, the Institute of Higher Studies for
National Defence published a 90-page report called UFOs and Defence:
What Must We Be Prepared For? It has become a bible for UFO
enthusiasts the world over.
It says in the preamble: "The accumulation of well-document-ed
observations compels us now to consider all hypotheses as to the
origin of UFOs, especially extraterrestrial hypotheses."
The report discusses 15 cases, including one in which British jet
fighters were scrambled from RAF Lakenheath to investigate mysterious
objects over East Anglia in 1956.
It says that hoaxes are easily detectable and calls the position of
America "still one of denial". It concludes: "The physical reality of
UFOs, under control of intelligent beings, is almost certain."
The American attitude is exemplified by the former Arizona governor
Fife Symington, who trotted out an aide dressed as an alien 10 years
ago to spoof the frenzy surrounding mysterious lights in the Phoenix
sky.
Now he says he saw the lights and believed from the start that they
were extraterrestrial. Symington, who faced fraud charges at the time,
said this week he did not need the problems such an admission would
have created.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/europe/article1563805.ece
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