What happened
In 1977 France did something no other major power had done: it placed the study of UFOs inside its national space agency. The Groupe d'Étude des Phénomènes Aérospatiaux Non-identifiés, GEPAN, was created at the Centre National d'Études Spatiales (CNES) in Toulouse, with astronomer and engineer Claude Poher as first director under CNES director general Yves Sillard. It grew out of earlier steps: in 1974 the Gendarmerie had been instructed to record sighting reports, and a study by the association of auditors of the Institute of Higher National Defence Studies (IHEDN) recommended a dedicated unit. Gendarmes channelled thousands of reports to the group, which could call on CNES laboratories when physical traces were found, most famously at Trans-en-Provence in 1981. GEPAN became SEPRA in 1988 and, after a 2005 audit, GEIPAN, which in 2007 began putting its case archive online.
The official explanation
GEIPAN describes its role as a technical expertise service that collects, analyses and archives reports and informs the public; most cases are explained as aircraft, satellites, astronomical objects, balloons, lanterns and similar sources. French skeptics criticised the unit in 2007 for filing sightings as unidentified too quickly, and its later published estimates put genuinely unexplained cases at around 3 percent.
The anomalous case
France's own space agency has maintained, for nearly fifty years, an official category for well-documented cases that remain unexplained after expert analysis. Even at today's lower estimate of around 3 percent, that represents a body of government-investigated reports with no identified cause. GEPAN's founding was prompted by a defence-institute study, and GEIPAN today notes that CNES works under the supervision of ministries including Defence. When physical traces were reported it could mobilise CNES laboratories, as in its well-known Trans-en-Provence investigation, giving France a rare state-funded capacity for UAP field science. Former head Jean-Jacques Velasco later helped write the COMETA report, which argued the extraterrestrial hypothesis was the most likely explanation for the hardest cases.
The strongest argument that this was something genuinely unknown or classified, with each claim attributed to the person who made it.
Documents
- From the GEPAN to the GEIPAN official, geipan.fr
Sources
- From the GEPAN to the GEIPAN GEIPAN / CNES
- GEIPAN Wikipedia
- French report COMETA, 1999 (on IHEDN origins of GEPAN) Patrick Gross, UFOs at close sight
Witness reports elsewhere
These archives can't be republished here, so we link to them instead.