InvestigationGEPAN → SEPRA → GEIPAN (1977–present, France)

aka GEPAN → SEPRA → GEIPAN (1977–present, France)

The world's only continuously-operating government UFO-investigation office housed inside a civilian space agency: a unit of France's CNES in Toulouse, running since 1977, which classifies cases on a four-level scale and in 2007 became the first such body to publish its entire archive online.

apparatus-event A standing government investigative office, not a single event. Held as apparatus-event: it is the continuously-operating European counterpart to the U.S. Sign→Blue Book→AARO lineage and the institutional home of the Trans-en-Provence trace case.

status history (1)

2026-06-13 · new → apparatus-event — seeded 2026-06-13 — spine-widening pass (Special Report 14 / Sturrock / GEIPAN)

▸ Deep dive — full timeline, named personnel, sensors, theory-by-theory analysis, and the conventional explanations weighed against the open questions →

The control room of France's CNES (Centre National d'Études Spatiales) in 1985 — the civilian space agency that has housed the GEPAN/SEPRA/GEIPAN UFO-study office in Toulouse since 1977. (André Cros / Archives municipales de Toulouse) Wikipedia Commons · CC BY-SA 4.0 · André Cros · 1985

France’s national UFO-study office has run continuously inside the Centre National d’Études Spatiales (CNES), the French civil space agency, in Toulouse since 1977. It was founded as GEPAN (Groupe d’Études des Phénomènes Aérospatiaux Non-identifiés) under engineer Claude Poher, renamed SEPRA (Service d’Expertise des Phénomènes de Rentrées Atmosphériques) in 1988 under Jean-Jacques Velasco, and renamed GEIPAN (Groupe d’Études et d’Informations sur les Phénomènes Aérospatiaux Non identifiés) in 2005. Reports reach it through the Gendarmerie, civil aviation, and the public; investigators classify each case as PAN A (identified), B (probably identified), C (insufficient data), or D (unexplained after thorough investigation). A small but persistent fraction — on the order of a few percent — end as PAN D. In March 2007 GEIPAN became the first government body in the world to put its complete case archive online for public access, a transparency posture with no direct counterpart in the U.S. record. Its best-known investigation is Trans-en-Provence (1981), where GEPAN documented chemical and biological changes in soil and plants at a reported landing site; the office’s methodical, instrument-oriented, document-everything approach made it the model later invoked by the COMETA authors and the Sturrock Panel.

Notable & intriguing

GEIPAN and its predecessors (GEPAN, 1977; SEPRA, 1988) constitute the only government UFO-investigation office in the world to operate continuously inside a civilian space agency, with an unbroken institutional and documentary lineage from 1977 to the present.

CNES/GEIPAN institutional history; en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GEIPAN
GEIPAN classifies cases as PAN A/B/C/D, with PAN D meaning ‘unexplained after thorough investigation’; across its archive of several thousand cases, roughly 3% are classified PAN D — a residual comparable in scale to Project Blue Book’s and Special Report 14’s.

GEIPAN public case statistics, CNES; classification methodology published at geipan.fr
In March 2007 GEIPAN became the first government body anywhere to publish its complete UFO case archive online, a deliberate transparency policy that predates the U.S. ODNI and AARO disclosures by more than a decade.

CNES press release, March 2007; GEIPAN online archive launch

Public-record items already documented about this subject. Folklore is labelled. Sources cited where the specificity warrants it.

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