Why France Has a Team of UFO Hunters

Thousands of UFO sightings are reported every year but not many countries are willing to spend money investigating them - there is just one dedicated state-run team left in Europe. Is France onto something?

By Chris Bockman BBC 11-4-18

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France is the only country in Europe to maintain a full-time state-run UFO (unidentified flying objects) department. There used to be one in the UK and another in Denmark but they closed down years ago due to budget cuts.

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France and Chile Embark Upon a Joint Exploration of UFOs

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Formally into terra incognita

By Billy Cox De Void 12-12-14

     Bon chance and buena suerte to researchers in France and Chile as they embark upon a joint exploration of The Great Taboo. After agreeing to collaborate in 2013, Chile’s government-sponsored Committee for the Study of Anomalous Aerial Phenomena (CEFAA) and a French NGO, the SIGMA2 Technical Commission, announced their “first working meeting” in Paris on Oct. 28-29. The following day, CEFAA chief Ricardo Bermudez and GEIPAN's Xavier Passot, head of the official French research group, convened to offer their governments' respective stamps of approval.

First, a few definitions. We know about CEFAA, they’ve been around since 1997 by order of Chile’s civil aviation department. And we know about GEIPAN, the French agency that, as a branch of its space program, has been collecting UFO data under various acronyms and incarnations since 1977. GEIPAN assigns an A through D rating system to its UFO reports, with D being the truly puzzling cases without explanation. Some 20 percent of its 2,200 cases on file fall into the D file.

This part is news to De Void: SIGMA2 is a branch of 3AF, a private-sector technical society, the rough equivalent of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics here in the States. According to SIGMA2 Commission President Luc Dini, “We work with GEIPAN to look at ‘D’ cases ... where GEIPAN has no special expertise to look further for explanation and causes. Since our role is not official, without direct involvement into the field investigation, we are focused on the analysis of physics and measurements ... after the preliminary investigation.”

According to Dini, Chile has concluded UFOs, or UAP, or PAN in the preferred local parlace, pose a “potential aviation risk,” but CEFAA has no analytical component like SIGMA2. And that’s significant because, says Dini, CEFAA “wants to go beyond the investigation and attempt to scientifically explain the causes” of the phenomenon. If only they were a bit more ambitious ... At any rate, Dini says SIGMA2 is not only eager to move forward, but that this “axis of cooperation” has “confirmed its intention to develop a network of scientific and technical expertise, in France, in Europe and outside Europe, to conduct physical case studies and discuss technical analysis.”

Clearly, one of those partners will be American, the nonprofit National Aviation Reporting Center on Anomalous Phenomena. For 15 years, NARCAP has been assessing The Great Taboo’s potential for catastrophic air corridor encounters, despite being underfunded and underpublicized. Imagine what NARCAP could do with even a modest federal grant of, ohh, say, $307,524. That’s how much the National Science Foundation and the Office of Naval Research are spending on their so-called “Sea Monkey study,” which concludes in February. The goal is to see if brine shrimp can be trained to swim with enough synchronization to affect a healthier circulation of ocean currents.

Sea Monkeys.

Anyhow, life goes on without Uncle Sam, and as Jose Lay confirms in an email to De Void, a lot of credit for what’s happening now goes to the foundation laid by the “Symposium on Official & Scientific Investigations of UAP (UFOs)” in North Carolina last year. An invited speaker and CEFAA official, Lay met with GEIPAN's Passot during the two-day event, and “we exchanged information and agreed in principle to start formal cooperation between our entities.” Then they actually followed up on it. And the rest is history.

"I know from personal experience that the relationship of other governments to this issue is important to members of the U.S. government in terms of considering a new official involvement with this issue," states author Leslie Kean, who played a key role in organizing the conference in Greensboro. "The fact that the two leading agencies in the world - one from Europe and the other from South America - are joining forces is extremely significant, and hopefully this step forward will help encourage our government to take the subject seriously and to join in the growing international effort.

"The U.S. role is important, because once the U.S. is on board - even by simply appointing one staffer to evaluate the validity of U.S. involvement - many other countries will come on board. Even a crack in this now shut door would be enough to radically change the picture. If we can simply assign a government appointee to evaluate the question -- are UFOs worthy of investigation? -- then we have made a giant step forward."

Lay cited Kean and conference financier Kent Senter, who dropped a load on the symposium despite his struggle with cancer, for creating such a rational and productive climate. So yeah, some things do work out. And who knows, maybe they all will, eventually, if you’ve got the patience of a saint.

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Chile’s UFO Investigations to be Aided by French Aerospace Organization

By Alejandro Rojas openminds.tv 12-16-14

     The Aeronautical and Astronautical Association of France (3AF) has signed an agreement with Chile’s Committee for the Studies of Anomalous Aerial Phenomena (CEFAA) to cooperate on the study of UFOs. 3AF posted an article on their website late last month explaining their newly founded relationship with CEFAA.

3AF is an important organization in France, and in Europe’s aeronautical industry in general. Similar to the United State’s American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, it is a society for those participating in, or interested in, the aerospace industry.

Surprisingly, 3AF also has a strong interest in the investigation of UFOs. Although, it might not be too surprising to those who know that the French government is one of very few that have an official organization that investigates UFOs. It is called the Study and Information Group on Aerospace Unidentified Phenomena (GEIPAN), and is part of France’s National Center for Space Studies (CNES), their version of NASA.

CEFAA, which is also an official government sanctioned UFO research organization, differs from GEIPAN in that it is part of Chile’s Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGAC), the equivalent to the FAA here in the U.S.

3AF also has a UFO study commission called 3AF/SIGMA2. This commission aides GEIPAN in the scientific analysis of UFO reports, and they will now help CEFAA in a similar fashion. 3AF’s article explains that CEFAA has determined that the UFO phenomena is real, and that it may pose a risk to aviation. Now they wish to further examine “their causes and their effects.” . . .

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France Maintains a Full-Time State-Run UFO Department

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Why the French state has a team of UFO hunters

By Chris Bockman
www.bbc.com
10-3-14

"France is the only country in Europe to maintain a full-time state-run UFO (unidentified flying objects) department."

     Thousands of UFO sightings are reported every year but not many countries are willing to spend money investigating them - there is just one dedicated state-run team left in Europe. Is France onto something? . . .

An offshoot of all that - France is the only country in Europe to maintain a full-time state-run UFO (unidentified flying objects) department. There used to be one in the UK and another in Denmark but they closed down years ago due to budget cuts.

France's UFO unit consists of four staff, and about a dozen volunteers who get their expenses paid to go on site and look into reports of strange sightings in the skies.

The team is called Geipan. That's a French acronym for Study Group and Information on Non-Identified Aerospace Phenomenon. . . .

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Scientists & A Select Few Ufologists Gather in France

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A very important workshop on UAP

By Keith Basterfield ufos-scientificresearch.blogspot.com 8-2-14

     GEIPAN

The "Groupe D'Etudes Et D'Informations Sur Les Phenomenes Aerospatiaux Non Identifies" (GEIPAN) held an important workshop, on 8th and 9th July 2014, in Paris, France.

GEIPAN was created by the "Centre National d'Etudes Spatiales" (CNES) to study reports of "Phenomenes Aerospatiaux Non identifies" (PAN) (Unidentified Aerospace Phenomena.) The CNES is the National Centre for Space Research for France, and is responsible for proposing space policy and implementation to the French government.

The Workshop

The workshop, of scientists and invited UAP researchers, was looking at methods and tools, which could improve the collection and analysis of information on "Unidentified Aerospace Phenomena."

A number of very interesting talks were presented, including:

• "Useful research methods for aircrew and air traffic controller UAP sightings." Richard Haines.

• "Keeping Omni-comprehensive UFO databases: a cost benefit analysis." Edoardo Russo.

• "Unidentified Aerial Phenomena: a strategy for research." Jacques Vallee.

• "The Hessdalen Phenomena: 30 years of research, instrumentation, results, witness stories, challenges and difficulties." Erling Strand.

• "Instrumented monitoring of aerial anomalies." Massimo Teodorani.

Attendees included Jeremiah Vaabaillon, Paris Observatory; Jacques Py, Psychology professor; Thomas Rabeyron, psychology lecturer; and representatives of the gendarmerie and the French Air Force. In addition there were a number of civilian UAP researchers, including Richard Haines; Jacques Vallee; Bertrand Meheust and Ron Westrum. Australian researcher Bill Chalker was invited, but was unable to attend.

Workshops of this calibre are extremely rare, and GEIPAN is to be congratulated for arranging it. I look forward to reading any proceedings of this workshop, if they become available.

One cannot imagine such a workshop being organised here in Australia.

To read the available GEIPAN workshop material (in French) click here.

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Meet MUFON's New Executive Director Jan Harzan | VIDEO

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By openmindstv
7-25-13

      It was announced at the recent 2013 Mufon Symposium that Jan Harzan will become the new executive director of MUFON, taking over for Dave MacDonald. While Dave has spent the last year working on International relations for MUFON with much success, his position was meant to be interim and on August 1st Jan will replace Dave. . . .

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MUFON announces leadership change and alliance with French UFO agency

By Alejandro Rojas OpenMinds.tv 7-23-13

      The Mutual UFO Network (MUFON), the largest UFO investigation organization in the U.S. and possibly the world, recently held its annual symposium in Las Vegas, Nevada. The theme was Science, UFOs, and the Search for ET. The conference featured presentations from several Ph.D.s and scientists.

Among the news announced at the conference was a new Executive Director for MUFON, and the partnership between MUFON and France’s GEIPAN. GEIPAN is France’s official UFO investigation organization. It is a part of the CNES, France’s space agency, similar to NASA here in the US.

Dave MacDonald, the current Executive Director for MUFON, says his job was always meant to be temporary. Beginning on August 1, 2013, Jan Harzan, a long time MUFON volunteer and member of the board of directors, will take over. Harzan says that he was actually asked to take over the head position at MUFON when their last director, Clifford Clift, had to step down due to family health issues. However, Harzan needed to wait until retirement to take on the position. Now that he is retiring, Harzan is free to head the busy organization.

One of the things MUFON has been busy with is increasing their international presence. MacDonald and MUFON’s Director of Investigations and International Affairs, Ruben Uriarte, have been working hard to gain footholds in countries throughout the world. Uriarte says MUFON now has active members in over 30 countries and are working to forge relationships in parts of the world they rarely communicate with, such as Asia.

An international relationship that has been particularly exciting for MUFON has been the forging of formal relations with France’s GEIPAN. MacDonald was able to visit France and meet with GEIPAN administrators and form a working relationship that allows the groups to share best practices and aide each other with investigations. . . .

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UFO NEWS: New French Aerospace Report Endorses Reality of UFOs

By Antonio Huneeus
www.openminds.tv
8-16-10

     A new French report released on May 31, 2010 concluded that UFOs are definitely real and possibly of extraterrestrial origin. While not an official government study, the Progress Report of the Sigma/3AF Commission comes from a highly credible source, the Aeronautical & Astronomical Association of France, known as the 3AF, which established a Commission on Unidentified Aerial Phenomena back in May 2008. The Commission’s President is Alain Boudier, a former French Defense attaché, and one of its key members is Jean-Gabriel Greslé, a former fighter pilot who studied at the U.S. Air Force Academy and later became an airliner pilot with Air France, where he experienced a couple of UFO sightings. Greslé has published three UFO books in France, including Unidentified Flying Objects: An Airline Pilot Talks (Guy Trédaniel, 1993).

The Sigma/3AF is not a final report but just a work in progress document; nevertheless, it provides good background material on the history of official UFO research in France, a balance of Sigma’s work during the last two years, a brief description of the most significant French cases, and some comments and conclusions. The report begins with a brief history of French official UFO research, which is quite extensive: “France is the only country where the collection of Unidentified Aerospace Phenomena (PAN in French) and its scientific study have been assigned since 1977 to a civilian official organization, the CNES (National Center for Space Studies, the French space agency) through the GEPAN study group.” After a short description of this unit, now known as GEIPAN (Study and Information Group on Aerospace Unidentified Phenomena), the report outlines other official or quasi-official French studies, including the famous COMETA (Committee for In-Depth Studies) Report of 1999, issued by a group of high-ranking retired French military and intelligence officers, which concluded that UFOs were real and probably extraterrestrial.

Members of the Sigma/3AF Commission also met representatives of many other official French military and intelligence organizations that had some UFO involvement in the past. These included the National Gendarmerie, which has collected UFO reports systematically since the 1960s; the General Secretariat of National Defense, which issued an interesting report a few years ago (although I am not aware that it was ever released to the public); the Air Force; and one of France’s intelligence services, the General Directorate for External Security, which admitted through an “authorized source” that UFOs have been monitored by the agency since the early sixties.

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Capt Roy Bowyer Interviewed On British TV

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Channel Islands UFOs

By Dr. David Clarke
6-25-07

     Captain Ray Bowyer, the pilot who reported two UFOs over the Channel Islands on 23 April, will be appear on the British TV's Channel 4 this
afternoon (25 June) today to talk about his experiences.

As Ray is now talking publicly on TV about the investigation that is going on behind the scenes, I can say that this does appear to be one of the most interesting - and so far, inexplicable - UFO sightings made in the last decade.

Ray Bowyer has agreed to work with a small group of investigators including myself, Martin Shough, Paul Fuller and several others both in the UK and France, to reconstruct the Channel sighting using a collection of detailed evidence.

This includes video replays of the radar picture and audio recordings of the conversations between the pilots and air traffic control, all of which have been - perhaps uniquely in this case - preserved for use in our investigation. The video picture does appear to show two definate unidentified tracks corresponding with the position and timing of the visual sightings reported by Bowyer and another pilot in an aircraft flying in a different direction.

At the weekend I discussed the case with Jacques Patenet of the French government UFO agency GEIPAN, as both of us were guest speakers at the IUFO group CISU's congress at Saint Vincent in the Italian Alps. Patenet - who appeared most open-minded and happy to work with serious investigators - expressed an interest in the case which our UK MOD have dismissed as being of any interest as it occurred "within French airspace." Thankfully, the French are a little more open minded and if all goes to plan we should be able to draw upon GEIPAN's pool of expertise in the ongoing investigation.

More to follow in due course.

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Half of French UFOs Remain Unexplained

By Allison Hanes
National Post
4-9-07

1,600 cases; France puts three decades of archives online

     For three decades, an arms length branch of France's national space agency quietly gathered reports of strange apparitions in the skies over the republic, from bright lights zig-zagging in the dark night to calls about flying saucers.

A small team of investigators dutifully probed each sighting, and either reached a logical conclusion, or consigned it to enigma.

Now, after decades under lock and key in dusty filing cabinets, France went public with its "X-Files" late last month. The Centre national d'etudes spatiales decided not only to declassify more than 1,600 cases, but to scan each official page and post it online for all to see.

"When the site went live, it was hit by so much traffic it went down almost immediately," said Chris Rutkowski, a co-ordinator for the Winnipeg-based Ufology Research Centre, noting the popularity of the project.

With more than 100,000 documents the archives of GEIPAN, the Groupement pour l'etude et l'information sur les phenomenes aerospatiaux non indentifier, contains official police reports, statements by witnesses to bizarre scenes -- even colourful hand-drawn diagrams resembling children's artwork.

Each incident has been slotted into one of four categories: definitely solved, likely solved, unsolved for lack of sufficient information or unsolved mystery. More than half -- 58% -- of the phenomena investigated by the experts remain unexplained while just 9% have been definitely figured out.

For example, when two farmers in Royan came across a 50-centimetre metal cylinder in a field in 1985, GEIPAN launched a thorough investigation that involved contacting NORAD about satellite orbits and missile tests. It was finally determined the two men had discovered a piece of Nazi-era war machinery left behind when the Third Reich retreated.

An explanation was more elusive when GEIPAN inherited a case that had taken place 11 years before the body's creation.

Two children out herding cows in Cussac in 1967 came upon a sphere hovering over a field with little black beings running around underneath. The strange creatures were sucked into the sphere headfirst, which then flew away moving in an upward spiral pattern.

The frightened children ran home crying to tell their parents, who summoned the gendarmerie. The adults who returned to the scene remarked a strong odour of sulphur that lasted for days as well as burn marks on the grass five metres in diameter.

France is not the first country to peel back the layers of bureaucratic secrecy often surrounding the official study of bizarre phenomenon -- though it is the first to make its data so universally accessible.

The vault of the national Library and Archives Canada in Ottawa contains information from five different departments on UFO sightings and investigations in Canada, although the bulk of it can only be consulted in person. Britain's Ministry of Defence released a chunk of information last year and Sweden, Italy and Chile have made some data public.

While many governments have kept their UFO research under wraps or simply denied its existence, France has released "absolutely all" of its collection to the masses for the sole purpose of furthering science.

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More On Release Of French UFO Files

By Gildas Bourdais
3-29-07

     I met, for a second time, with Jacques Patenet, the engineer in charge of GEIPAN, the new French service of UFO studies at the French Space Agency CNES - Centre National d'Etudes Spatiales, or National center for Space Studies - and I can give some more information on the release of those UFO files.

We talked at a TV debate ("C Dans l'air"), recorded yesterday, airing tomorrow, Friday, March 30, on the French national network France 5.

Some more information, and some corrections of what has been already reported:

The name GEIPAN means Groupe d'Etudes et d'Information des Phenomenes Aerospatiaux Non identifies, (Group for Studies and Information on Unidentified Aerospatial Phenomena). It was created in September 2005, to replace the SEPRA, which closed in January 2004. Also put in place at that time, a steering committee (COPEIPAN) presided over by Yves Sillard, former director of CNES, and comprising about fifteen members, whose names are not known.

In January 2006, Jacques Patenet announced that GEIPAN was going to put all its UFO files on the web site of CNES, during 2006. The project had been delayed but has now begun with the release of some 400 files this monthh, covering the period 1988-2005.

Initial inquiries by CNES began in 1977 on the creation of the first service called GEPAN, but there are files from the fifties, and even one from 1937.

There are a total of 1,650 files, including some 6,000 testimonies, and a volume of some 100,000 pages, A4 format (not 100,000 files, as stated somewhere!).

This month, Jacques Patenet has given a number of interviews, in which he warned that we are not going to find any new big case. The best cases, such as Trans-en-Provence in 1981, are known already.

However, there is new information worth mentioning. The number of unidentified cases after serious study (the "PAN D" category), is now estimated at 25 to 28% (depending on the day ot the interview, apparently). This is much more than previous figures. In recent years, it was given at around 13%. So, the revision of the files has at least brought this bonus for French Ufology...

Two main ideas are being put forward by Jacques Patenet, in several interviews. First: "There are no secrets, and we are releasing all the files. Our purpose is to put to rest allegations of UFO secrecy. Second, the extraterrestrial hypothesis is conceivable, but there is not the slightest solid proof for it, or against either."

For my part, the point I want to stress is that, yes, these files at GEIPAN are not "secret" files. They are mainly sightings by civilian witnesses, gathered and reported by the Gendarmes - the military police. If there are really secret files in France, they are somewhere else, probably of military nature. At the debate yesterday on French TV, we pushed him a bit on that question, and he had to admit it. So, his first
the statement is somewhat misleading, in fact. If there are secret files, he just does not have them!

I also want to correct another mistake, seen in the Sunday Times article of March 25, "Spooky... They Start a UFO Website Then it Crashes". It mentions the COMETA Report (without naming it), published in 1999, as being a publication of the French government, at the IHEDN (Institut des Hautes Etudes de Defense Nationale). Some people had said it at the time, but it is not true. This report was from a private group, the COMETA, even if its true that it had been encouraged at the beginning by the head of IHEDN, General Norlain.

In all, I think that we can consider that publication of French UFO files as a very positive effort; which has already the effect of renewing interest for UFOs in the French media, and perhaps of putting France back on the map of Ufology!

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