GEIPAN

WHAT IT IS

GEIPAN stands for Groupe d'Etudes et d'Informations sur les Phenomenes Aerospatiaux Non-identifies - the Study and Information Group on Unidentified Aerospace Phenomena. It sits inside CNES, the Centre National d'Etudes Spatiales, which is France's equivalent of NASA. Its stated mission is to collect, analyse and archive reports of unexplained aerospace phenomena and to inform the public about what it finds. That last clause is the unusual part: publication is written into the job, not extracted from it afterwards by litigation or legislation.

THREE NAMES, ONE LINEAGE

The office was created in 1977 as GEPAN, under CNES director Yves Sillard, with the physicist Claude Poher as its first head. It was renamed SEPRA in 1988, when its remit was broadened to cover atmospheric re-entry phenomena as well, and took its current name, GEIPAN, in 2005. Anyone reading older French material will meet all three acronyms; they describe the same continuous institution, not competing programmes.

HOW A CASE REACHES IT

The structural advantage GEIPAN has over most civilian efforts is a formal intake channel. The French Gendarmerie was instructed to pass sighting reports through to the unit, which means witness statements arrive as official reports taken by police, with the identifying and procedural detail that implies, rather than as anonymous web submissions. The unit handles on the order of several hundred requests a year, and roughly one in ten cases leads to an on-site investigation.

Its investigative toolkit is deliberately unglamorous: cognitive interviewing techniques to get a more reliable account from a witness, reconstruction of what was actually in the sky at the time and place, and forensic analysis of photographs and video, for which it uses a dedicated image-analysis suite called IPACO. Where physical traces are alleged, CNES laboratory resources can be brought in.

THE A/B/C/D CLASSIFICATION

Every closed case is sorted into one of four categories, and understanding them is the key to reading any GEIPAN statistic honestly.

A means the phenomenon was perfectly identified after investigation. B means it was probably identified. C means it could not be identified because there was not enough data or information to work with - the case failed for want of evidence, which is a different thing from resisting explanation. D means the phenomenon was not identified even though there was enough material to analyse; it is subdivided into D1 and D2 by the quality and quantity of the available data. Only D is the genuinely unexplained residue.

WHAT THE NUMBERS ACTUALLY SAY

GEIPAN's own published summary of roughly forty years of work describes about 8,000 witness testimonies, corresponding to roughly 3,000 cases. Of those, close to 59 percent fall in A or B, explained by misidentification or error of perception. Around 34 percent land in C, unassessable for lack of data. That leaves on the order of 7 percent in D across the full history, and the office notes that the rate over the most recent decade is closer to 2 percent, which it attributes to more stringent criteria, better analytic tools and the re-appraisal of older files.

You will see very different percentages quoted elsewhere, and the discrepancy is usually not a dispute about facts. It comes from which categories a writer counts as "unexplained" - folding C in with D roughly triples the figure - from whether the base is testimonies or cases, and from the fact that the archive keeps growing while old cases get reclassified. A figure without its category definition attached is not really a figure. The direction of travel, though, is consistent and worth noting: the unexplained proportion has gone down over time as the tools improved, not up.

THE PUBLIC ARCHIVE

GEIPAN began putting its archival case records online in March 2007, and the searchable archive remains the single largest body of officially investigated, officially published UAP casework anywhere. It is the closest existing analogue to what the U.S. PURSUE programme started producing in 2026, with one important difference: GEIPAN publishes its own analysis and verdict alongside the report, where PURSUE mostly publishes the underlying documents and footage and leaves the assessment to AARO's separate reporting.

TRANS-EN-PROVENCE

The case most often cited from GEIPAN's history is Trans-en-Provence, in January 1981, where a witness in the Var reported an object landing briefly in his garden. It is notable within the file precisely because it is one of the rare instances with alleged physical traces: soil and vegetation from the site were analysed by laboratories, and the unit's report described measurable differences in the affected ground and plants. It has been contested ever since - over sampling method, over the strength of the botanical findings, and over what a physical anomaly can actually establish - and it sits in the file as an unresolved case rather than a demonstrated event. That is how GEIPAN itself frames it.

WHY IT MATTERS TO THE U.S. RECORD

GEIPAN is the best available answer to a question the American files cannot address on their own: what happens if a government simply investigates this steadily, in the open, for fifty years? The answer is neither of the two outcomes the loudest voices predict. It did not produce a confirmed non-human craft, and it also did not explain everything away and close down. It produced a large, well-documented archive in which the overwhelming majority of sightings resolve into ordinary things, a substantial fraction can never be assessed at all, and a small stubborn remainder stays open.

That is close to where AARO has landed in the United States and close to where the UK Ministry of Defence's Condign report landed in 2000, from three different national starting points and three different institutional cultures. The convergence is itself a data point. For the wider European context - what the EU institutions do and do not do, and why GEIPAN has no continental counterpart - see Europe and UAP.

GEIPAN IN 2026

The unit remains active and its intake channel intact. In June 2026 the French National Assembly hosted a public colloquium on research into unidentified aerospace phenomena, bringing lawmakers, scientists and military representatives into the same room in a formal parliamentary setting - a French echo of the congressional attention the subject has drawn in Washington since 2022. In August 2026, when Euronews reported on European Commission interest in the subject, GEIPAN was the only standing national office it could point to anywhere in the EU.