Thursday, March 29, 2007

Website Crashes Because of French UFO Fever

The national space agency in France has opened its files to the public on a new web site showing UFO sightings over the last 50 years.
The French national space agency has decided to make all of the records of UFO sightings for the last 50 years public. It has set up a web site in order to make this possible and so many people have tried to look at the site that it is nearly impossible for others to get onto the site. This is the first time that France has made these files public. Other countries make the information available but usually on an individual case-by-case basis under the Freedom of Information Act.Thanks to a small team of space agency researchers who call themselves the Office for the Study of Unidentified Aerospace Phenomena, the French will be able to access some 10,000 documents about UFOs, including photographs, police reports and videos sent in by witnesses. The team offers explanations for some of the sightings - for example when 1,000 people reported seeing flashing lights in the sky one November night 17 years ago, the researchers were able to prove it had been a rocket fragment falling back into the earth's atmosphere.Currently, only 9 percent of all of France's UFO sightings have been fully explained. And of the 1,600 cases registered since 1954, nearly a quarter are known as Category D - meaning that in spite of good data and witnesses, the mysterious sightings remain inexplicable. This new website database will be updated on an ongoing basis as new cases are reported.

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