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Otherworldly wide Web: They're out there

France puts its archive of the unexplained on the Internet.

PARIS - The saucer-shaped object is said to have touched down in the south of France and then zoomed off. It left behind scorch marks and that haunting age-old question: Are we alone?

This is just one of the cases from France's secret "X-Files" - some 100,000 documents on supposed UFOs and sightings of other unexplained phenomena that the French space agency is publishing on the Internet.

France is the first country to put its entire weird sightings archive online, said Jacques Patenet, who heads the space agency's UFO cell.

Their oldest recorded sighting dates from 1937, Patenet said. The first batch of archives went up on the agency's Web site (www.cnes.fr), drawing a server-busting wave of traffic.

"The Web site exploded in two hours. We suspected there was a certain amount of interest, but not to this extent," Patenet said.

The archive includes police and expert reports, witness sketches, maps, photos, video and audio recordings.

The agency said it is making them public to draw the scientific community's attention to unexplained cases and because their secrecy generated suspicion that officials were hiding something.

"There's always this impression of plots, of secrets," Patenet said. "The great danger would be to leave the field open to sects and charlatans."

So, do we have neighbors out there, after all?

"I don't have an answer to that," said Patenet. "It's very complicated."

[Last modified March 24, 2007, 09:07:31]