Meeting France's UFO detectives

France in focus

Is there anybody out there? In France, an organisation exists whose sole role is to answer this question. The GEIPAN, part of the French space agency, decodes dozens of cases each year. They try to find rational reasons to seemingly impossible sightings. In most cases they succeed, but a total of 99 phenomena remain unexplained to this day. Our reporters Joanna Cockerell and Sylvain Rousseau went to meet the detectives to see how they work and to understand why there is currently increased interest in UFOs.