I think that JR is into this kind of stuff, if not just disregard!

PARIS - On an August day in 1967, two children tending a herd of cows outside a village in central France reported seeing "four small black beings" fly from the ground and slip headfirst into a sphere that shot skyward in a flash of light and trail of sulfuric odors.

The alleged extraterrestrial sighting, described by the French government as "one of the most astonishing observed in France," is among 1,600 UFO case files spanning the last half-century that the country's space agency opened to the public for the first time Thursday.

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The voluntary decision by France's National Center for Space Studies to dump more than 100,000 pages of witness testimony, photographs, film footage and audiotapes from its secret UFO archives onto its Internet site, for worldwide viewing is an unprecedented move among Western countries. Most of them, the United States included, consider such records classified matters of national security.

The material dates as far back as 1954. Over the next several months, the space agency will post it to enhance scientific research seeking to explain what the French government calls "unexplained aerospace phenomena."

"The data that we are releasing doesn't demonstrate the presence of extraterrestrial beings," said Jacques Patenet, who heads the Group for the Study and Information on Unidentified Aerospace Phenomena, the space agency's UFO investigative team. "But it doesn't demonstrate the impossibility of such presence either. The questions remain open."

Patenet said that among the 1,600 cases to be opened to the public, "a few dozen are very intriguing and can be called UFOs."

Most of the cases were determined to be caused by atmospheric anomalies or mistaken perception of such things as airplane lights, or to be hoaxes. One case file described how investigators proved a man was lying about being abducted by aliens when blood tests failed to show he had recently experienced the weightlessness of space travel.

CONTINUED: Most credible UFO sightings detailed