“Unidentified Aerospace Phenomena in France: Seeking a renewed fascination for Space Exploration”

Abstract

Over the last 60 years the UFO subject has generated intense interest and invaded modern consciousness on a worldwide basis. Despite the fact that the majority of sightings can be attributed to the misidentification of natural or man-made objects (meteors, planets, rockets, space debris, satellites, weather balloons, etc), a small residue of cases seems to remain unexplained and the debate over and fascination for the extraterrestrial hypothesis regularly resurfaces.

The need for legitimacy of the UFO phenomenon was stressed in March 2007 when France, via its national space agency (CNES), became the first country to officially open its Unidentified Aerospace Phenomena (UAP) files on a website and announced that 14% of the total cases remained unexplained. Strong public interest was highlighted when the website crashed almost immediately due to the enormous number of hits.

Based on the currently available CNES files, which contain official reports gathered and transmitted by the French military police to the CNES, this paper presents a sample of some intriguing French UAP cases over the last thirty years by associating each one with different aspects of space exploration and related technological advances and events. Certainly the question arises as to whether the expanding presence of man outside Earth, the ever growing space technologies and the proliferation of space images and documentaries over the last fifty years, have contributed to the omnipresence of UFOs either in the skies or in the minds. Rather than debating the existence of a genuine phenomena and in light of the existence of many observations made at close distance not fitting in the regular stereotypes, this paper calls for keeping an open-mind on the Unidentified Aerospace Phenomena.