The truth is online. In a world first, the French space agency, CNES, made its official UFO archives public on 22 March.
The agency went public because people were concerned about secrecy and conspiracies, says Jacques Arnauld of GEIPAN, the CNES unit set up to investigate UFOs in 1977. 鈥淲e really have nothing to hide.鈥�
So far, the GEIPAN website () contains just a quarter of the more than 6000 eyewitness UFO reports sent to the unit by police over three decades. Typically, such reports are followed up by police and scientific and military experts. GEIPAN has debunked about 75 per cent of them. 鈥淯sually people are seeing weather balloons, lightning flashes or debris from satellites or rockets,鈥� says Jacques Patenet, head of GEIPAN.
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The rest are unexplained. 鈥淚n all probability, they have scientific explanations,鈥� says Patenet. 鈥淏ut frankly, we can鈥檛 disprove the extraterrestrial thesis.鈥�
