GEIPAN

GEIPAN (Groupe d'Études et d'Informations sur les Phénomènes Aérospatiaux Non-identifiés) is the unidentified aerospace phenomena study group of CNES, the French national space agency. Operating continuously since 1977 under successive names (GEPAN, then SEPRA, then GEIPAN), it is the world's longest-running official civilian UFO investigation office.

CNES created GEPAN in 1977 amid strong French sighting waves and scientific interest, giving it gendarmerie cooperation: officers collect witness reports and physical samples under standard procedures, a structural advantage no other country matched.

GEIPAN receives reports (about 700 annually in recent years), investigates with staff and volunteers, and classifies cases A through D: fully identified, probably identified, unidentifiable for lack of data, and D, unidentified after investigation with good data. Roughly 3 to 4 percent of its modern caseload sits in category D. It published its entire archive online beginning in 2007, thousands of cases, and produced the field's benchmark physical-trace studies, Trans-en-Provence (1981) and the Amarante case (1982). Its analyses feed CNES engineering and, indirectly, the European scientific conversation the COMETA authors drew on.

Founding director Claude Poher; successors including Jean-Jacques Vélasco (who personally concluded, past his official role, that some cases suggested artificial objects) and modern heads who keep the office deliberately conservative.

Active within CNES in Toulouse, cooperating informally with foreign counterparts and cited by AARO-era reformers as the model of transparent state investigation.

French skeptics have periodically attacked GEIPAN's category-D residue as inflated by weak methodology; believers have attacked its conservatism. Vélasco's personal conclusions caused an institutional distancing in the 2000s. Its transparency, both sides concede, is why the arguments can be had at all.