On March 22, 2007, France's space agency CNES opened GEIPAN's public online archive of French PAN/UAP case files. GEIPAN's 2006-2007 steering committee report later dated the launch to March 22 and recorded that traffic overwhelmed the site in less than two hours, forcing a crisis response and a simplified service restored from March 28.1
Origin
The archive grew out of a long French institutional chain: CNES created GEPAN in 1977, GEPAN became SEPRA in 1988, and a CNES audit led to GEIPAN replacing SEPRA in 2005 with a stronger public information mandate.23
That new mandate was explicit. GEIPAN's own history says the "I" for information was reflected in the publication, begun in 2007, of its archives and files through a public website. The steering committee report says putting the archive online was its first decision, made to answer the CNES president's demand for transparent activity toward the public and media.21
The opening slipped from an initial end-of-2006 target because GEIPAN had to cope with a poorly structured legacy database, more than 100,000 pages to digitize and anonymize, and CNES security requirements for a public site.1
Who
The archive was a CNES release through GEIPAN, the technical department charged with collecting, analyzing, investigating, publishing, and archiving reports of unidentified aerospace phenomena. CNES describes GEIPAN as created within the agency and based in Toulouse, with public release of sighting reports and conclusions while maintaining witness anonymity.34
Institutionally, the work sat inside a broader French network. CNES lists GEIPAN partners including the Gendarmerie, Police, Air and Space Force, CNRS, and Meteo France, while GEIPAN describes cooperation with civil and military authorities, scientific experts, and a steering committee tied to UAP-related public institutions.34
What opened
CNES framed the release as the publication of 30 years of field investigations and collected testimony. Its archive announcement described roughly 1,600 cases, nearly 3,000 gendarmerie reports, about 6,000 testimonies, and the equivalent of about 100,000 A4 pages, including police reports, expert reports, witness sketches, video, and audio.5
The archive also made GEIPAN's classification problem visible. CNES noted that some cases remained "type D" aerospace phenomena, meaning unexplained despite precise witness statements and collected material, and said the public release was intended to draw scientific attention to those unexplained files.5
How evolved
The first public release immediately proved more politically and technically consequential than a simple document dump. GEIPAN's steering committee said more than 150 media interventions followed the opening, public expectations rose sharply, and the archive's early traffic forced GEIPAN to trade a fuller launch experience for a simplified static regional search until the service could mature.1
CNES now treats the archive as part of GEIPAN's standing public mission rather than a one-time disclosure. Its project history says the GEIPAN website was created in 2008 and UAP archives were transferred to it, while GEIPAN's current case-search page exposes the database as a searchable public catalogue with cases, testimony files, classifications, dates, departments, and downloads.36
The classification system also evolved after the opening. GEIPAN says that since 2008 it has used a more detailed A/B/C/D1/D2 method based on residual strangeness and consistency, with witness anonymization and website publication as formal workflow steps.78
By April 28, 2026, GEIPAN's dynamic statistics page counted 3,351 published cases, with most categorized as identified, probably identified, or lacking enough data, and a smaller investigated residue classified as unexplained. That later database scale shows how the 2007 opening became a living archive rather than a frozen historical release.67