UFO reports released
Published 9:00 pm Thursday, March 22, 2007
PARIS – 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 sulfuric odors.
The alleged extraterrestrial sighting, described by the French 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 Thursday.
The voluntary decision by France’s National Center 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.
Within three hours of posting the first cases Thursday morning, the French space agency’s Web server crashed, overwhelmed by the flood of viewers seeking the first glimpses of official government evidence on a subject long a target of both fascination and ridicule.
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.”
Most of the cases were determined to be caused by atmospheric anomalies or mistaken perception of such things as airplane lights, or to be hoaxes. One case file described how investigators proved a man was lying about being abducted by aliens when blood tests failed to show he had recently experienced the weightlessness of space travel.
In one of the cases investigators consider most credible, a 13-year-old boy and his nine-year-old sister were watching over their family’s cows near the village of Cussac on Aug. 29, 1967 when the boy spotted “four small black beings” about 47 inches tall, according to documents released Thursday. Thinking they were other youngsters, he shouted to his sister, “Oh, there are black children!”
But as they watched, the four beings became agitated and rose into the air, entering the top of what appeared to be a round space ship, about 15 feet in diameter, which hovered over the field. Just as the sphere rose up, one of the passengers emerged from the top, returned to the ground to grab something, then flew back to the sphere.
The sphere rose silently in a spiral pattern, then “became increasingly brilliant” before disappearing with a loud whistling sound. It left “a strong sulfur odor after departure,” the report said.
The children raced home in tears and their father summoned the local police who “noted the sulfur odor and the dried grass at the reported place where the sphere took off,” the report continued. Investigators said they were impressed by the uniformity of detail provided by the children and other witnesses.
“No rational explanation has been given to date of this exceptional meeting,” the investigation concluded.
