Why the French state has a team of UFO hunters [1]

...France is the only country in Europe to maintain a full-time state-run UFO (unidentified flying objects) department. There used to be one in the UK [2] and another in Denmark but they closed down years ago due to budget cuts.

France's UFO unit consists of four staff, and about a dozen volunteers who get their expenses paid to go on site and look into reports of strange sightings in the skies...

They publish their results on their website [3] which gets 30,000 hits a month. The team receives, on average, two UFO sightings a day. The department insists an 11-page form is filled out for each one. The idea is to provide details including photographs where possible but also weed out jokers and time-wasters.