THE first official government website in the world to document UFO sightings has collapsed under a stampede by the public to gain access. However, it is not known why the server has not been restored over the last week.

The National Centre for Space Studies, the French equivalent of Nasa, opened the website on Thursday, unveiling an archive of documents about hundreds of unidentified flying object sightings in France over the past 50 years.

Such was the excitement and scramble to pick through this treasure trove that the website was overloaded and “crashed” - but it should have been restored by now some observers say.

The archive includes photographs, police records of interviews with witnesses and even video recordings.

“It is a world first,” said Jacques Patenet, an aeronautics engineer in charge of the space centre’s “study of nonidentified aerospatial phenomena”.

Of the 1,600 cases registered since 1954, almost a quarter are classified as “D”, meaning that “despite good or very good data and credible witnesses, we are confronted with something we cannot explain”, said Patenet.

For example, in 1994 the crew of an Air France flight from Nice to London saw a giant disk that seemed to keep changing shape and colour. After a minute or so it disappeared.

On January 8, 1981, in southern France, a man working in a field reported hearing a strange whistling sound. He saw a saucer-like object about 8ft in diameter land in his field about 50 yards away.

The object took off almost immediately, leaving burn marks. Investigators took photographs and collected and analysed samples, but they have not been able to explain the phenomenon.

Nearly 1,000 witnesses said they saw flashing lights in the sky on November 5, 1990, but this was just rocket fragments falling back into the Earth’s atmosphere.

Perhaps the best documented European incident involved the scrambling of two Belgian air force jets in March, 1990, to investigate an aircraft flying over the south of the country in a manner “outside the normal performance envelope of any air-plane”, as the chief of Belgian air force operations described it afterwards.

The new French website, once reactivated, will be updated whenever there is a new sighting, see www.cnes-geipan.fr

What follows is a video apparantly taken on new years day 2007 in Santiago, Chile. The video shows an object hovering in the sky and occasionally lighting up somehow. After a little while the object begins to move back and forth quite rapidly.

This is the work of Joseph P. Skipper I compiled into a video.
Mars Picture Analysis M. Skipper at www.MarsAnomalyResearch.com

Nice video - never been debunked so not sure?

Anyone heard any updates on the O'hare Chicago UFO reported a few months ago? It seems like many witness photos and testimonials are very slow to come out - this was because apparently the staff at the airport were told they would be sacked if they reported anything ...

France's national space agency has opened its UFO files to the public by launching a website which documents reported sightings over five decades.

So many people have already tried to look at the files that it has become impossible to access the site.

France is the first country to open up fully its UFO files to the public.

Although other countries including the UK collect data on UFOs, files can be requested only on a case-by-case basis under the Freedom of Information Act.

Now, 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.

But only about 9% of France's UFO cases have ever been fully explained, the group says.

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.

The online archives will be updated whenever new cases are reported.

Here's the site www.cnes-geipan.fr

Hi all,
Sorry i am resdesigning this blog, I apologise fot the bad looking colours they will be changed soon!

Former Arizona Republican Governor Fife Symington III said that he had witnessed one of the “craft of unknown origin” during the 1997 Phoenix Lights event, but noted that he didn’t go public with the information. In an interview with the Daily Courier in Prescott, Fife said:

“It was enormous and inexplicable. Who knows where it came from? A lot of people saw it, and I saw it too. It was dramatic. And it couldn’t have been flares because it was too symmetrical. It had a geometric outline, a constant shape.

Fife also noted that he did request information from the the commander of Luke Air Force Base, the general of the National Guard, and the head of the Department of Public Safety. But none of the officials he contacted had an answer for what had happened, and were also “perplexed.”

Frances Barwood, who was the former Phoenix city councilwoman in 1997 and who launched an investigation into the event, said that out of the more than 700 witnesses she interviewed, “The government never interviewed even one.”