France's space agency is opening its «X-Files» to the public, putting years of UFO research and tens of thousands of documents on the Web. Eventually, about 100,000 documents _ including police reports, sketches, photos, videos and maps _ will go up on the site. The first batch went up Thursday, and the site got so much traffic that it has been difficult to access since, AP quoted sources of the space agency, known by its French initials CNES, as saying. For years, a small group of space agency researchers have been trying, with limited funding, to explain reports of unidentified flying objects. The team calls itself the Group for Study and Information on Unidentified Aerospace Phenomena. Only about 9 percent of France's UFO cases have ever been fully explained, the group says, while experts have found a likely explanation for another 33 percent of cases. Some cases unraveled over years. In 1985, two farmers near the Atlantic coastal city of Royan saw a burning object drop into a field nearby. Experts initially concluded that it was part of the propulsion device of a recently launched satellite. But eventually, they realized it was a piece of leftover German World War II ordnance that spontaneously exploded four decades after the war and launched into the sky, the agency said. Another case concerned a 1994 Air France flight. While flying over the Paris region, the airplane's crew noticed a large brown-red disk hovering in the horizon and constantly changing shape. The case «has never been explained to this day, and leaves the door open to all possible hypotheses,» the agency wrote.
