GEIPAN / GEPAN

GEIPAN (formerly GEPAN) is France's official UAP research office, operating continuously since 1977 inside CNES, the French national space agency — making it the Western world's only sustained, uninterrupted government scientific UFO study, still active today nearly half a century after Project Blue Book closed in the United States. The office investigates reports using a formal four-tier classification system, grading each case from A (fully identified) through D (genuinely unexplained despite complete data), a rigor-first approach that has made GEIPAN's case files a reference standard cited by researchers across the ETH, IDH, and skeptical camps alike. Its single most consequential investigation is the 1981 Trans-en-Provence trace case, where GEPAN-commissioned agronomists tested soil samples from the reported landing site and documented genuine biochemical alteration to the vegetation consistent with the witness's account — a scientific analysis of physical trace evidence that few other UFO cases anywhere in the world have received. Unlike the U.S. pattern of politically fraught opening and closing of official study programs, GEIPAN has operated with quiet institutional continuity since its founding, publishing its full case database publicly and maintaining the four-tier classification system as ufology's closest analogue to a genuinely peer-reviewable government scientific process.