Paris
France has become the first country to put all its files on UFO sightings on the Internet. The archive includes police and expert reports, witness sketches, maps, photos, and video and audio recordings. Most phenomena are reports of lights in the sky, not sightings of physical objects. Still, of the more than 1,600 sightings registered, nearly 25 percent are considered “credible and unexplainable.” One involves a 1994 Air France flight over Paris, on which the airplane’s crew reported seeing a large disk that hovered near the horizon and kept changing shape. “The Web site exploded in two hours,” said Jacques Patenet, head of the French space agency’s UFO group. “We suspected that there was a certain amount of interest, but not to this extent.” The Web site will be accessible at www.cnes-geipan.fr/geipan once a bigger server is found.
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