GEIPAN

The GEIPAN (Study and Information Group on Unidentified Aerospace Phenomena; French Groupe d'Études et d'Informations sur les Phénomènes Aérospatiaux Non-identifiés) is the service of the French space agency CNES, based in Toulouse, that collects testimony about, investigates, archives and publishes reports of unidentified aerospace phenomena seen over France. CNES's director general Yves Sillard created it in 1977 as the GEPAN under the engineer Claude Poher; it became the SEPRA in 1988 and was reconstituted under its present name in September 2005. It reports within CNES's technical and digital executive department and answers to a steering committee, the COPEIPAN; it works with the Air Force, the National Gendarmerie, the National Police, the CNRS, Météo-France and the civil aviation authority, and with a national network of volunteer field investigators.

The unit's own FAQ says its mission is fact-finding for the scientific community rather than the rendering of an opinion; it states that it can neither prove nor disprove the extraterrestrial hypothesis, while its steering committee holds that it cannot discard the possibility that some fraction of the most strange unexplained reports might be due to distant and advanced civilizations. Those who led the French studies have said on the record that the phenomenon is real (the GEPAN's 1978 assessment, and the SEPRA's Jean-Jacques Velasco in 2004), while the investigators David Rossoni, Éric Déguillaume and Éric Maillot, writing in Skeptical Inquirer, re-examined the main cases of three decades of official French studies and found that the cases do not support extraterrestrial visits. The service is distinct from the covert French Secret Space Program that the filmmaker Jean-Charles Moyen alleges, a programme in which he says he served aboard the Solaris craft.

Origins

Before 1977 the subject was handled in France by the Air Force's intelligence offices — the Bureau Prospectives et Études of the air staff dealt with pilots' observations — by the Gendarmerie, which had joined field investigations in 1952, and by private research associations; the engineer Claude Poher, a member of the informal Invisible College with Jacques Vallée and Aimé Michel, became director of the sounding-rocket division of CNES in 1969. In a 1974 radio interview the Minister of the Armed Forces, Robert Galley, said that the information the Gendarmerie passed to CNES was "quite disturbing"; members of the Institut des Hautes Études de Défense Nationale had recommended a UFO study office the same year, and a 1977 report by the institute's association of auditors repeated the recommendation.

GEPAN (1977–1988)

CNES created the GEPAN in 1977 with a scientific council, chaired by the president of CNES, to oversee it; Poher presented two studies totalling nearly a thousand pages in 1977 and 1978. After Poher left in 1978 Alain Esterle directed the group until 1983, and it issued technical notes on individual investigations and on statistical typologies; Velasco then led it for twenty years. Its investigators met witnesses after the Gendarmerie had taken the first statement and made a first field investigation, and used equipment developed partly by Velasco, including a device for simulating on site what a witness had seen. CNES later withdrew the group's ability to carry out further scientific studies of its own, after some of them failed to reach their aims, so that its work narrowed to collecting data while scientific programmes were ordered through CNES's Scientific Programs Committee.

SEPRA (1988–2005)

The GEPAN became the Atmospheric Reentry Phenomena Expertise Service, the SEPRA, in 1988. In February 1995 General Denis Letty organised a conference on unidentified aerospace phenomena at the Air School and, with the support of General Bernard Norlain of the Institut des Hautes Études de Défense Nationale, set up the committee whose report, the COMETA report, appeared in 1999; according to Yves Couprie and Egon Kragel, Velasco submitted it to Prime Minister Lionel Jospin that year. In February 2000 CNES took the monitoring of atmospheric re-entries away from the service, renamed it the Service d'Expertise des Phénomènes Rares Aérospatiaux and refocused it on collecting witness reports and building a database; an external audit that the CNES presidency commissioned in 2001, the LOUANGE report, led to the reorganisation of 2005.

GEIPAN (2005–present)

CNES reorganised the SEPRA as the GEIPAN in September 2005, with the COPEIPAN steering committee replacing the earlier scientific committees of the GEPAN and SEPRA and an added mission of informing the public; its first director, Jacques Patenet, launched the sorting and digitisation of the archive. A CNES report of March 2007 announced that the unit was opening its files online and put the share of sightings still unidentified at 28%, while the authors of a 2025 review of government studies, one of them the unit's director, date the authorisation to open the archives to 2009, when 30% of the investigation files were ready for publication. Volunteer investigators replaced the earlier first-level inspectors, forming a national network of about fifteen people, and the partnership begun with the Gendarmerie was extended to Météo-France, the Air Force's national air operations centre, CNES's space surveillance centre, the civil aviation authority, the CNRS and university experts in psychology. The unit held workshops on methods and tools for collecting and analysing reports at CNES in July 2014 and again in 2022.

Jacques Vallée says that the French space agency's team has monitored reports from the public and from scientists within the agency for over forty years and that the materials he examined there were open to him to borrow, and Christopher Mellon describes it as a small office on a small budget that each year takes the top cases from the police and the military, brings in scientists and engineers, and sees what it can make of them. The service has a core team of three to four people, about twenty outside investigators and twenty experts, and a budget that the Connexion reports as about a thousandth of CNES's human-resources budget; it receives about 700 notifications a year and opens 150 to 200 investigations. The Defence Historical Service opened the archives of the Gendarmerie's UFO investigations for 1954–1983 in March 2021, the unit presented its methods to NASA's independent study team on unidentified aerial phenomena in October 2022, and Frédéric Courtade, a materials scientist from CNES's expertise laboratory, became director in January 2024.

Method and classification

Each investigation runs in three stages — collection of testimony through police reports or a website questionnaire designed with psychologists, technical analysis with specialised databases and software, and where warranted a field investigation using cognitive interviewing — and a multidisciplinary committee of experts reviews the difficult cases. Since 2005 the unit has sorted investigated cases into four classes: A, a phenomenon perfectly identified; B, probably identified but lacking evidence; C, not identified for lack of data; and D, not identified after investigation. Figures published for the share of reports left unidentified or unexplained include:

A common argument among those who read the unit as predisposed toward the extraterrestrial hypothesis notes that its term PAN, rendered UAP in English, means unidentified aerospace phenomena where English-speaking bodies normally say aerial.[citation needed]

Open questions

References

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