Thursday, 19th of March, 2009, the french national space agency unveiled a website documenting more than 1,600 sightings spanning five decades. (The site: http://www.cnes-geipan.fr ) The online archives contain catalogues with detail cases that continue to perplex even the most skeptic scientists.
"It is a world's first," said Jacques Patenet, the aeronautical engineer who heads the office for the study of "non-identified aerospatial phenomena."
UFOs (OVNIs in French) always managed to generate intense interest and also conspiracy theories about government cover-ups of findings to avoid world's panic.
"Cases such as the lady who reported seeing an object that looked like a flying roll of toilet paper" are clearly not worth investigating, said Patenet.
Many other cases involving multiple sightings - in at least one case involving thousands of people across France - and evidence such as burn marks and radar trackings showing flight patterns or accelerations that defy the laws of physics are taken very seriously.
1,600 cases were registered since 1954 and nearly 25 percent are classified as "type D", meaning that "despite good or very good data and credible witnesses, we are confronted with something we can't explain," Patenet said.
