Quick one regarding caches of websites : Dates of UFO releases on French GEIPAN website

A Spanish researcher whom I respect, Vicente-Juan Ballester Olmos, has asked me about UFO documents released by a French government agency. Many of you may be unfamiliar with his name, but some of his work was posted by Internos in the thread on ATS entitled "The state-of-art in UFO disclosure worldwide"). As I said there, his work is often overlooked because his first language is English (and there is a definite tendency in the English-speaking UFO community to focus on the work of researchers in English speaking countries) and he avoids sensationalism (and researchers that make more sensational statements gain more attention - whether their work deserves it or not...).

He has asked for the dates of releases between August 2009 (when 380 cases were released) and April 2010 (when 58 cases released), together with the number of cases released on each such date.

Since I don't speak French, I haven't paid much attention to (or downloaded) the documents released in France and don't know the answer to his question. However, since I've been asked some questions by Vicente-Juan Ballester Olmos I'd like to be able to pass on the answers to him (giving credit - of course - to whoever can find the information).

The French archive can be found at the link below:
www.cnes-geipan.fr...

When you call up that page, a box on the left lists the most recent releases and the number of documents released. For example, it currently states (as translated by Google):

May 2011
143 new cases of a total of 1344 published cases. End of 1976.

September 2010
60 New cases of a total of 1201 published cases. First half of 1977.

July 2010
59 New cases of a total of 1141 published cases as well as more recent records. End of 1978.

April 2010
58 New cases of a total of 1082 published cases as well as more recent records.

Now, it occurred to me that I simply needed to look at a cached version of that page on the Wayback Machine and find similar boxes on earlier dates, to fill in the gap in V-J's records.

Unfortunately, the Wayback Machine doesn't appear to have any captures for that page.

The Wayback Machine does, however, have some caches of www.cnes-geipan.fr - which used to have a similar box of announcements of recent releases. From the two caches at the links below, I've found some earlier information (but not for the period between August 2009 and April 2010 requested by V-J...):

web.archive.org...://www.cnes-geipan.fr/
web.archive.org...://www.cnes-geipan.fr/

The bits of information I've found on the current website and those two caches is as follows:

Added on 02/05/2007: About 80 new cases of comments were posted
online, bringing the number of cases distributed to about 440,
covering a large part of the observations made during the years 1986
to 2005.

Added on 19/06/2007: Forty additional cases representing almost all
observations from 1985 have been posted. The case of aircraft
observations are still being processed.

Added on 25/07/2007: New update with the addition of thirty cases
observed during the years 1983 1984.

Added on 16/10/2007: New update, which includes the launch of a
majority of the observations recorded in 1982 and 1983

Added on 09/01/2008 : The work of on-line archive of GEIPAN continues:
more than 70 cases mainly concerning the year 1981 have just been
added.

(March 2008) About 150 cases will enrich the database, covering almost
all observations of 1980.

(May 2008) Update 130 new cases, and after the late 1980s and more
recent records.

(Jun. 2008) 36 new cases, the beginning of 1979.

(Jul. 2008) 52 new cases, the end of 1979.

(September 2008) 56 new cases, year-end 1979.

Are there any useful caches of old webpages other than the Wayback Machine, or some other way of finding the information requested by Vicente-Juan Ballester Olmos?


Incidentally, I must say that I found the numbers on the official French website to be rather confusing. Take May 2011 for example :

(a) as noted above, the entry on the current website states "143 new cases of a total of 1344 published cases" - but if you leave everything blank and do a search then you get results which indicate a total of 6,720 cases so I don't know how that relates to the "total of 1344 published cases" and

(b) if you sort by the final column ("update") then you get over 13 pages of results with an "update" in May 2011, with 20 results per page - i.e. over 260 cases, so I don't know how that relates to the "143 new cases" mentioned on that website for May (unless some previously released cases were also updated).

All the best,

Isaac

reply to post by IsaacKoi


I think that difference is because they show the number of new cases (143 added in May, for example), but a case may have several documents.

If you do a search with empty fields and click on the first column ("Nom du cas" - "Case name") you can see that the names are repeated.

If you click on "MàJ" ("Date de mis à jour dans la base" - "database update date") you can sort the documents by date published, but I haven't found the cases from the period you want.

Edit: the Internet Archive's Way Back Machine is the only site I know that stores old sites.

Originally posted by ArMaP
If you do a search with empty fields and click on the first column ("Nom du cas" - "Case name") you can see that the names are repeated.

Ah, I see. Thanks Armap - I hadn't sorted by that column. Well, that's one bit of potential confusion resolved.

So, I could probably tell V-J that he can get the number of cases released in the period not covered by his notes by sorting by date of update, finding the entries for the relevant period and cutting and checking if each relevant case had been included with any earlier update date.

Of course, if someone can find a cache of the previous news releases stating the relevant month and number of pages for the period not covered by V-J's notes then that would save him quite a bit of time and effort...

All the best,

Isaac