GEIPAN and the 1999 COMETA Report

Briefing

France is the only major state to run a permanently staffed, publicly funded unidentified aerospace phenomena unit inside its civil space agency. GEIPAN sits within CNES, which has studied such phenomena since 1977 [1][2]. Separately, in July 1999, a private committee of retired French generals, admirals, engineers and one serving space-agency official — COMETA — published a ninety-page report, Les OVNI et la Défense : à quoi doit-on se préparer ?, arguing that the extraterrestrial hypothesis could not be dismissed [8][9]. The two are frequently conflated. They should not be: GEIPAN is a state body that remains operational, headed by Frédéric Courtade since January 2024 [2]; COMETA was a one-off private association whose recommendations, so far as the record shows, were not adopted [8][9].

Sequence of events

The state unit

• 1974. French national police — the gendarmerie — were reported to have been asked to collect UFO reports [9].
• 1976. A committee of IHEDN auditors, chaired by gendarmerie member Robert Blanchard, recommended the creation of a study group [9].
• The first of May 1977. GEPAN (Groupe d’Étude des Phénomènes Aérospatiaux Non identifiés) is created as a section of CNES [1][9]. CNES director general Yves Sillard initiated its creation; Claude Poher was its first director [1].
• The eighth of January 1981. A reported landing at Trans-en-Provence (Var) produced physical ground traces. GEPAN analysed soil and plant samples and published Technical Note No. 16, Analyse d’une trace. The case remains classified D — unexplained [8][10].
• 1988. GEPAN is replaced by SEPRA (Service d’Études des Phénomènes de Rentrées Atmosphériques), broadening the remit to atmospheric re-entry phenomena [1].
• The twenty-eighth of January 1994, 13:14. The crew of Air France flight AF3532, an A320 on the Nice–London route, reported “a brown or reddish-dark disc changing shape before disappearing suddenly” near Coulommiers (Seine-et-Marne). A radar echo was recorded for fifty seconds by the Cinq-Mars-la-Pile radar, crossing the aircraft’s track and matching no filed flight plan. GEIPAN’s file concludes “Ce cas s’avère donc inexpliqué” and classifies it D1 [7].
• End of 2001. CNES management commissions an audit to decide the activity’s future [1].
• 2005. The CNES president restructures the unit: GEIPAN replaces SEPRA, adding “Information” to the acronym, with the explicit recommendation to “informer le public en toute transparence” [1].
• 2007. GEIPAN begins publishing its archives and case files online [1].
• January 2024. Frédéric Courtade becomes head of GEIPAN [2].

The private committee

• March 1995. General Denis Letty is reported to have approached IHEDN director General Bernard Norlain to propose a new committee on UFOs [9].
• Early 1996. COMETA is formed; it worked for approximately three years [9].
• July 1999. Les OVNI et la Défense is published [8][9]. One secondary account gives the date as the sixteenth of July and states the report was initially intended only for President Jacques Chirac, Prime Minister Lionel Jospin and other officials, reaching print “at the instigation of a journalist” as a special issue of the magazine VSD. The COMETA text itself, as fetched, carries no such delivery statement [9].

Documentary record

The COMETA report runs to ninety pages and analyses named cases including Trans-en-Provence (the eighth of January 1981), Cussac (the twenty-ninth of August 1967), Valensole (the first of July 1965) and Air France AF3532 (the twenty-eighth of January 1994) [8][9]. Its central claim is stated directly: “The accumulation of well-documented sightings made by credible witnesses forces us to consider from now on all of the hypotheses regarding the origin of unidentified flying objects, or UFOs, and the extraterrestrial hypothesis, in particular” [8]. It closes with six recommendations: inform decision-makers; reinforce SEPRA; check whether space-surveillance agencies have detected UFOs; create a strategic committee at the highest level of the French state; undertake diplomatic action with other nations, especially the United States; and study emergency measures [8][9].

The committee was chaired by Gen. Denis Letty (Air Force) and included Michel Algrin (Doctor of Political Science, attorney), Gen. Pierre Bescond (weapons engineer), Denis Blancher (Chief of Police), Gen. Bruno Le Moine (Air Force), Christian Marchal (chief mining engineer, ONERA research director), Adm. Marc Merlo and Alain Orszag (Doctor of Physical Sciences, weapons engineer general), with Jean-Jacques Vélasco (then head of SEPRA), François Louange (Fleximage), the pilots Jean-Charles Duboc, Jean-Pierre Fartek and René Giraud, and Michel Périvier (Gendarmerie squadron commander) [8]. Gen. Bernard Norlain, former IHEDN director, wrote the foreword; André Lebeau, former CNES chairman, the preamble [8][9]. Notwithstanding those credentials, the report’s own copyright page identifies COMETA as “an association governed by the Law of July 1, 1901” — a private association under French law, not a government body [8][9].

GEIPAN case file 1994-01-01345 lists among its attachments a meteorological radiosonde report, an investigation report, a CODA chronology, two gendarmerie witness statements (PV n°351) and technical testimony forms [7]. The disc-shaped object reported by the AF3532 crew, taken together with the fifty-second radar track, is what carries the file to D1.

GEPAN Technical Note No. 16 records the Trans-en-Provence analysis. The plant biochemistry was performed by Michel Bounias of INRA, Avignon, with Vélasco leading the GEPAN investigation; the analysis is reported to have found young leaves showing the biochemical characteristics of aged leaves, from which Bounias concluded the results “might be consistent with an electromagnetic source of stress” [10]. That is a conditional finding and is recorded here as such.

The classification standard is GEIPAN’s own: A, “phenomenon perfectly identified after investigation”; B, “probably identified”; C, “not identified due to lack of data”; D, “not identified after investigation”, split since 2008 into D1 (strange, medium consistency) and D2 (very strange, high consistency — multiple independent witnesses and/or photo-video and/or ground traces) [3][5]. GEIPAN receives accounts “directly on its website or from statements recorded by the gendarmerie, civil aviation or other authorities”, and is overseen by COPEIPAN, a steering committee drawing on the gendarmerie, police, air and space force, CNES, CNRS, Météo-France, psychologists and other experts [2].

Open questions

1. The percentages do not agree. CNES publishes 24.6% clearly identified, 39.7% probably identified, 32.4% unidentified for lack of data and 3.3% unidentified after investigation [2]. GEIPAN’s classification page gives 63.2% A+B, 33.4% unassessable and approximately 3.4% unexplained, falling to 2% over the last decade, with roughly 10% of cases receiving on-site investigation [3]. Its mission page states approximately 7% unexplained historically [4]. Its February 2016 statistics note gives “11 à 13% selon le mode de calcul” for category D across 2,200-plus published cases [6], and its December 2016 note gives 227 D cases out of 2,292 for 1975–2014 falling to 24 of 1,159 for 2005–2014 — attributing the drop to case-volume growth, stricter D1/D2 criteria and improved investigation methods rather than to fewer genuine anomalies [5]. GEIPAN does not reconcile the spread beyond noting that the calculation basis differs.
2. COMETA’s own figures do not match GEIPAN’s. The report cites GEPAN/SEPRA category D cases as “4 to 5% of the cases”, over 5,000 gendarmerie reports since 1974 and roughly 100 joint field investigations [8].
3. No official response to COMETA has been located. The primary sources do not state what, if anything, the French government did with the six recommendations. Mark Rodeghier of the Center for UFO Studies wrote in Summer 2000 that they had “not been heeded by French decision-makers”; that is his assessment, not a state statement [9].
4. The source of the fifty-second radar track in the AF3532 file is not identified by GEIPAN [7].
5. The total number of published case files, and the D1/D2 split, are not stated in any primary source retrieved.
6. Three widely repeated claims could not be sourced at all and are excluded from this file: that France is the only nation to publish its entire UFO case file; that a CNES report of 2007 found 28% of sightings unidentified; and the “1,600 cases / 100,000 pages” figures attached to a March 2007 archive-launch press release. No official document carrying any of them was retrievable, and the 28% figure conflicts with every GEIPAN percentage that was verified.

Status

This file is CONFIDENTIAL — admitted on the strength of published government records from CNES and GEIPAN, chiefly the unit’s own history, classification standard and the AF3532 case file [1][2][3][7]. The COMETA material is admitted as a document of record: the report demonstrably exists and its authorship is established, but it is the product of a private association and its conclusions are not findings of the French state [8][9].

Several of COMETA’s positions are held at arm’s length by this archive. The report is reported to treat the 1947 Roswell event seriously, and Rodeghier’s summary has the authors coming down “on the side of the hypothesis that what crashed there was an alien spacecraft, which was recovered by the U.S. government”, with Letty quoted as conceding there is no proof while maintaining that U.S. authorities know more than they say [9]. The report also gives weight to magnetohydrodynamic propulsion, associated with the physicist Jean-Pierre Petit, and to the “space island” generation-ship concept of the astronomers Jean-Claude Ribes and Guy Monnet [9]. These are the committee’s theories, recorded here because they are part of the document, not because the archive endorses them.

The Air France sighting’s reported shape places this file alongside the archive’s record of disc and saucer reports; the Trans-en-Provence ground traces bear comparison with other physical-trace cases such as Rendlesham Forest, though the two events share no connection beyond that class of evidence. Updates pending any official French response to COMETA entering the public record.

References

1. GEIPAN / CNES — “Its history”. Accessed 6th September 2026.
2. CNES (Centre National d’Études Spatiales) — “GEIPAN” project page. Accessed 6th September 2026.
3. GEIPAN / CNES — “Classification”. Accessed 6th September 2026.
4. GEIPAN / CNES — “Mission & GEIPAN”. Accessed 6th September 2026.
5. GEIPAN / CNES — “Forte baisse des CAS D sur les 10 dernières années”, 14th December 2016.
6. GEIPAN / CNES — “Des statistiques mises à jour”, 1st February 2016.
7. GEIPAN / CNES — case file « AF3532 » [AERO AFR] COULOMMIERS (77), 28th January 1994, ref. 1994-01-01345.
8. COMETA (1999). Les OVNI et la Défense : à quoi doit-on se préparer ? — English translation, full text. Via the Internet Archive.
9. Rodeghier, Mark, ed. (2000). “The 1999 French Report on UFOs and Defense”, International UFO Reporter, Summer 2000, pp. 20–23, 30. Center for UFO Studies. Reproduced under fair use.
10. The Black Vault — “Trans-en-Provence, France, Physical Trace Case – 8th January 1981”. Accessed 6th September 2026.