Photo Source: CIA

Now that the French government has made their ufo records available I decided to take a quick glimpse. People that are interested in ufos always hope to find something that will conclusively prove that ufos are extraterrestrial vehicles, but I am a little more realistic. I know that even though the book has been opened, if there was a sighting that was considered solid proof, in either wouldn't be in there or someone would have heard about it by now. Still, one can't help but be curious and I am more curious than most so I ventured over to the French site run by CNES which is the French Space Agency. Once there I read a short article on what was being offered.

The first thing that caught my eye was the statement that “The vast majority of sightings are simply luminous phenomena moving across the sky,” Sure we all know of luminous objects, but I never thought of these sightings as the "vast majority". One of the French researches explains that we should not even think of them as objects. This is the reason they are not called ufos but uaps which stand for unidentified aerospace phenomena. I had seen the term uap, but since I didn't speak French, I thought that this was the French equivalent of ufo, I couldn't have been more wrong. What we would call the ufo unit is called GEIPAN which means Groupe d'Etude et d'Information sur les Phenomenes Aerospatiaux Non Identifies. Please bear in mind that none of the accents can be printed by my keyboard so I have left them off. This is quite a mouthful, but basically it means Group of Study and Information on the Not identified Aerospace Phenomena. As you can see, this is a machine translation and is a little rough, but I think you get the idea. There was a previous group formed in France to study ufos or uaps in 1977 and it was called GEPAN., in 1988 it became SERPA Then in 2005 it became GEIPAN.

No records of sightings before 1988 were put online initially and I don't know if they will ever be, but the French Space Agency states that every recorded sighting since 1988 is on line and available. The government does say that it is going to eventually have online every sighting it received since 1954 and that will make about 6,000 accounts in 3,000 sighting reports of 1,650 sightings. A little confusing isn't it? The head of the GEIPAN Unit states that nothing has been left to protect official stories and he guarantees that the truth is here, not out there. I was disappointed to find that the 'next' link in the article I was reading didn't work, maybe that was the end of the article? . Well so much for the article I was reading. I decided to check a few reports next. They were in French of course, so thank goodness for babelfish the translation site run by Altavista.

Here is where I hit my first glitch. I thought that the reports were in pdf format files, those are the kind that are read by the Adobe Acrobat reader and it seems that the translator can't translate these types of pages. They do sell software that translates pdf files, but I am not about to buy something that I will only use once. So here I am again. I tried to get on to the French uap site when it was first opened to the public but it crashed almost immediately and was not accessible for a couple of days. It may have been possible to get on during that time, if one were to try continuously, but I just didn't have the heart to make this an all day and night project.

I found an inexpensive piece of translation software called the Cute Translator. I have been using Cute products such as CuteFTP and a few other programs for a few years now and I have been totally satisfied. I might just purchase the Cute translator because it states that it will translate not only the languages I want but also do it from pdf files. Since the translator does about 12 popular languages it just might be handy if I want to examine files from other countries. I'll have to think this over, because unlike other sites that derive an income, About Facts Net costs me money to run. Remember there is no advertising on the site hence no revenue.

I was able to translate some document titles that are online and here are a few of them:
1. What does one have to do to prepare their defense (against uaps)? 1999
2. Making of indicators of independence between witnesses in the case of observation of UFO F Askevis - F Cavé 1981(They said UFO)
3. The UFO in the press. Study of the national daily newspapers. F Askevis - F Cavé - D. Ludwig 1981
4. Mémoire de fin d'études ENSEEIHT. Ecoulement hydrodynamique autour d'un cylindre en présence d'un champ de forces de Laplace. M. Aguavo - J.M. Cazaux 1983
5. Note information n° 1 Observations of abnormal phenomena in the USSR statistical study.

These don't seem to be uap sightings but rather papers or studies done in connection with sighting reports. There are 30 or 40 of these available. Could it be, was I looking in the wrong place for sighting reports?

Wait a second, I found the sighting reports and they are not in pdf. It was hard for me since everything was in French. I feel like I have discovered a treasure trove. Here is the link that takes you to a map of France, where you can click on to get reports from a particular provence, * http://www.cnes-geipan.fr/geipan/recherche.html

Here is one report that I translated to wet your appetite:

I guess there were a few earlier sightings put on the site already, since obviously this is before 1988. If we could only get some of the other governments of the world to make all their ufo files public, wouldn't that be great? Imagine what the U.S. and Russia have? Oh well, maybe the French move will convince more countries to open their files. Enjoy your browsing through the French ufo reports, or should I say uap reports?