geipan.fr — what France's public UAP case archive contains and how to use it

The contemporary GEIPAN function operates a public website at geipan.fr which has, over the past decade and a half, progressively released the accumulated French national UAP case archive to public access. The released material substantially exceeds in scale and detail any equivalent national archive currently in public release — including the United States AARO public materials, the United Kingdom MoD declassified files, and the Brazilian FAB pilot-report batches — and constitutes the most substantial public resource for systematic study of a national institutional UAP case archive currently available.

What the archive contains

The geipan.fr archive includes individual case files for substantially all formally investigated cases from the GEPAN, SEPRA, and contemporary GEIPAN periods that have been cleared for public release. Each case file typically includes: a case-summary identifying the date, location, and initial observational character; the gendarmerie or other field-investigation report material; the GEPAN/SEPRA/GEIPAN analytical assessment; any associated physical-evidence documentation; and the assigned case classification under the A/B/C/D framework.

The archive's organisation is structured to support both browse-by-period and search-by-feature access. Researchers can identify cases by date, by geographic location, by case classification, and by reported observational features. This structured-access capability is one of the principal advantages the GEIPAN archive offers over national archives that are released as document collections without case-level structured metadata.

What the archive does not contain

The archive does not include all cases the programme has investigated. A subset of cases — particularly cases involving sensitive defence-relevant operational context or third-party-witness privacy considerations — remains held in restricted form and is not currently in public release. The proportion of the total caseload represented in the public archive is substantial but is not the entirety of the programme's accumulated work.

The archive also does not include sensor data in the form of raw radar files or original photographic material in most cases. The released material includes summary characterisation of any such data and the analytical conclusions drawn from it, but the underlying source material is typically held in the programme's institutional archive in formats not directly accessible through the public website.

How researchers productively use the archive

The geipan.fr archive supports several distinct research applications. Case-by-case research on individual French cases is the most obvious application, with the substantial advantage that the released material includes the full institutional investigative record rather than only the case's public-press narrative. Systematic study of the French programme's institutional posture across periods is supported by the archive's chronological coverage. Comparative study with other national archives is supported by the consistent A/B/C/D classification scheme, which can be roughly mapped onto US Project Blue Book "identified/unidentified" and other national framework categories.

The principal limitation researchers encounter is the French-language character of the archive material. Substantively all case-file material is in French; the geipan.fr site offers limited translated content. Researchers without working French face a meaningful access barrier that the archive's structural openness does not address.

For comparison with the UK MoD UFO Desk archive and the contemporary AARO public materials, see the SkyLens UAP files page.

Editorial note: Independent SkyLens analysis of a French institutional UAP case or the GEPAN / SEPRA / GEIPAN investigative framework. The case index linking related releases is on the SkyLens UAP files page.