The unveiling of the French UFO Files

On an August day in 1967, two children tending a herd of cows outside a village in central France reported seeing "four small black beings" fly from the ground and slip headfirst into a sphere that shot skyward in a flash of light and trail of sulphuric odours. The alleged extraterrestrial sighting, described by the government as "one of the most astonishing observed in France," is among 1,600 UFO case files spanning the last half century that the country's space agency opened to the public for the first time on March 22. The voluntary decision by France's National Centre for Space Studies to dump more than 100,000 pages of witness testimony, photographs, film footage and audio tapes from its secret UFO archives onto its Internet site, www.cnes.fr, for worldwide viewing is an unprecedented move among Western countries. Most of them, the United States included, consider such records classified matters of national security. The material dates as far back as 1954. Over the next several months, the space agency will post it to enhance scientific research seeking to explain what the French government calls "unexplained aerospace phenomena.'' "The data that we are releasing doesn't demonstrate the presence of extraterrestrial beings," said Jacques Patenet, who heads the Group for the Study and Information on Unidentified Aerospace Phenomena, the space agency's UFO investigative team. "But, it doesn't demonstrate the impossibility of such presence either. The questions remain open.'' Patenet, who said he has never seen a UFO, said that among the 1,600 cases to be opened to the public, "a few dozen are very intriguing and can be called UFOs.''