Alien life and UFOs: Evidence about extraterrestrials to be revealed by German government?

After a lengthy legal battle, Germany's parliament - the Bundestag - has been ordered to release confidential documents about UFOs, reports the Daily Mail.

The dispute over the matter reportedly started in 2008 when Dr Wolfgang Schäuble, Federal Minister of the Interior at the time, denied that the German government had ever investigated UFOs.

However, in 2009, a UFO enthusiast named Robert Fleischer discovered that a parliamentary department had been investigating extraterrestrial objects. Later, a German blogger named Frank Reitemeyer took the Bundestag to court over secret reports.

In 2011, Reitemeyer won his first fight after the Berlin Administrative Court ruled that German citizens had the right to view the classified report being put together by the country's Scientific Service.

Reitemeyer reportedly put forth the following argument to the Berlin court: (via The Huffington Post).

"I want to know facts and it bothers me that in France, England, USA, Canada, the citizens can see the UFO files, and I am not informed as a German from my German government. It is therefore such a glaring discrepancy... In France, a citizen is automatically informed by his government because the government provides the UFO files to the website of the space agency, so officially on the government side, anyone can view the documents free at home," Reitemeyer said according to the Daily Mail.

UFO enthusiasts are already looking forward to March 2016, when the UK's Ministry of Defence will make 18 confidential UFO files available in the National Archive, although there's a chance they may not be accessible by the public.

Some paranormal investigators have greeted the forthcoming (date not revealed as yet) German release with enthusiasm, but Nigel Watson, author of the UFO Investigation Manual, said: "They won't reveal any secrets about hidden alien technology or alien bodies." He then added, "...but then again we can always hope!"

Watson believes some governments hide UFO-related information to protect other secrets. "Sometimes governments hide information like this to protect operational procedures or protect non-UFO related secrets, like the capabilities of early warning systems or the names and details of witnesses," he said. "In this case perhaps they don't want to show they have taken this subject seriously, or that they are as much in the dark as everyone else."

It was only in 2005 that the British government admitted conducting a thorough scientific study into UFOs, after years of denial.

"It concluded that unidentified aerial phenomena, or UAPs, do exist, but not flying saucers," Watson said. "When, or if the German files are released, it will be interesting to see if they come to similar conclusions."

He told MailOnline: "I doubt [the information] will be anything related to the recovery of crashed saucers or clandestine meetings with aliens. It looks like much of their material is related to the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (Seti) and the implications of alien contact and whether this relates to UFO sightings in Germany."

"Then again there might be some surprises!" he concluded.