GEIPAN: France’s Official, Open, Scientific Archive of Unidentified Aerospace Phenomena
- Since the 1970s, France has run an official archive of unidentified aerospace phenomena (UAPs) through GEIPAN, a unit of the national space agency CNES. Its mission is to collect, analyze, publish, and archive reports of unidentified sky phenomena in a systematic, scientifically rigorous way. - GEIPAN originated in 1977 as GEPAN, became SEPRA in 1988, and was renamed GEIPAN in 2005. In March 2007, it began making hundreds of sighting files available online to the public, alongside a searchable archive of reports, testimonies, diagrams, and classifications. - The work is strictly technical and investigative: witnesses’ accounts are gathered, multidisciplinary analyses are conducted, and cases are classified along a spectrum from explained to probably identified to unexplained. Public archives store these records for broader scrutiny and research. - Key aspects of GEIPAN’s approach include collaboration with French police, civil aviation authorities, meteorologists, and scientists; the aim is to document phenomena that cannot yet be explained with current tools, not to seek extraterrestrial life. - About 400 cases were published online initially from a larger corpus of over 1,600 documented reports, and the archive has grown since. The public availability and the standardized, peer-reviewed data are presented as a historic model of governmental transparency in this field. - The public archive enables independent researchers, citizen science, and academic studies by offering data organized by category, date, or location. While many cases are explained or probably identified, a small portion remains unexplained after thorough analysis, underscoring the value of continued scientific investigation. - The article emphasizes that GEIPAN’s openness has influenced how other nations think about recording and sharing sighting data, promoting a more transparent and methodical global debate on unidentified aerial phenomena. The GEIPAN site continues to be updated with recent reports and offers links to the full archives for ongoing exploration.
Source: clickpetroleoegas.com.br
