France’s national space agency, Centre National d’Etudes Spatiales, will place information about some 6,000 reports of UFO activity online in early 2007.
All the conspiracy theorists and X-Files fans who didn’t stick to their French language studies after school ended will give online translation sites a workout once CNES, the French space agency, opens up its archives of UFO sightings to the Internet.
Reuters noted the names of people who submitted reports related to 1,600 incidents would not be included in the online accounts. That is probably a prudent move, since they could be subject to a lot of intrusions on their time.
The reports include accounts from professionals like airline pilots, who in turn reported sightings to law enforcement. CNES has been collecting these since the late 1970s with an eye on studying and eventually releasing them.
With 6,000 reports on 1,600 incidents, duplicate observations of the same incident will be among the information CNES releases. Since some of these reports will come from pilots, who have the training to understand whether they are seeing naturally occurring phenomena or something else, they should make for some compelling reading.
Many UFO sightings have been attributed to factors like secret aircraft tests by the military, weather balloons, and other plausible reasons. But cases do exist where UFOs remain unidentified.
One very current example happened in early November 2006 at Chicago’s O’Hare Airport. An AP report said accounts of a saucer-shaped object hovering over the airport made it to the Federal Aviation Administration.
The FAA initially denied such reports had been made. They promptly backtracked when the Chicago Tribune smacked them with a Freedom of Information Act request that revealed evidence FAA lied to the paper.
The sighting has been dismissed as weather-related phenomena. When the French reports come online, there will probably be lots of similar accounts from that archive.
The truth is out there.
—
Tag:
Add to 
Bookmark murdok: 
David Utter is a staff writer for murdok covering technology and business.
