On the afternoon of 29 June 2026, in the Salle Victor-Hugo of the Palais-Bourbon, the French National Assembly will host a colloquium on unidentified aerospace phenomena. It is the first event of its kind at the French Parliament, and its title sets its tone: “Research on unidentified aerospace phenomena beyond fantasies.” The organisers have chosen, before the first speaker takes the floor, to position the afternoon against speculation rather than toward it.
The event is being convened by two deputies from opposite ends of the political spectrum, Arnaud Saint-Martin of La France Insoumise and Pierre Henriet of Horizons, with the support of GEIPAN, the state body that has investigated such reports for France for nearly half a century. That pairing, a parliamentary initiative working hand in hand with the government’s own scientific service, is the feature that distinguishes the French response from the others the archive is tracking in the present disclosure cycle.
The longest unbroken programme
France’s institutional engagement with the subject is older and more continuous than any other country’s. In November 1954, after a national sighting wave, French parliamentarians put the first formal questions to their government about flying objects, and a small bureau, SEMOC, was created to study them. France was the first country whose legislators questioned the executive on the record about the phenomenon.
The durable structure came in 1977, when the national space agency CNES established GEPAN, the first government-funded scientific unit anywhere dedicated to investigating the reports. It was reorganised as SEPRA in 1988 and as GEIPAN in 2005, when it opened its database to the public. The lineage has run unbroken under CNES for forty-nine years. The archive holds a selection of the GEPAN and GEIPAN research documents in its French reading room.
GEIPAN’s working method is statistical and unglamorous. It holds roughly 18,000 testimonies, processes about a thousand reports a year, and conducts around two hundred full investigations. As of April 2025 it classed about 3.2 per cent of its cases as Category D, genuinely unexplained after investigation. That figure, neither dismissive nor sensational, is the baseline the colloquium starts from.
Who is convening it, and who is attending
Saint-Martin is a sociologist of science at the CNRS, on leave for his parliamentary term, and sits on the National Assembly’s defence committee and its science and technology office, OPECST. Henriet, a philosopher of science, is the first vice-president of OPECST and chaired it in 2022 and 2023. The press accounts have consistently highlighted that the two come from a hard-left party and a centrist one respectively, and chose to organise the event together.
GEIPAN is co-organiser. The confirmed participants reported by Le Parisien and LCP include representatives of the Ministry of the Armed Forces, Luc Dini of the 3AF Sigma2 commission, the technical UAP study group within the French aerospace professional association, and several sociologists of science. The 2026 colloquium follows a round table held at the Ecole Militaire in Paris in September 2025, which included a senior official from the defence procurement agency. The proceedings on 29 June will be filmed.
The posture: understand before believing
The organisers have been explicit about method. Saint-Martin told Le Parisien that the aim is not to dwell on American sightings, “on which there is already a great deal of focus,” but to draw up a panorama of research on the phenomenon in France. Henriet framed the choice to hold the event in public, telling LCP that rather than give the impression something is being hidden, the task is to “show that we can work rationally on these phenomena.”
Sylvain Maisonneuve, a crisis-management specialist and former ministerial adviser who is among the speakers, put the same discipline more plainly to Le Parisien: “Il ne s’agit pas de croire mais de comprendre” (it is not a matter of believing but of understanding). His proposed order of business is to characterise the phenomena, their reported behaviour and accelerations, before turning to any question of what they might be.
A contrast with COMETA
France has been here once before, though differently. In 1999 a private association of retired senior military and space officials published the COMETA report, “UFOs and Defence: What Must We Prepare For?”, and delivered it personally to Prime Minister Lionel Jospin. COMETA concluded that the extraterrestrial hypothesis was the most rational explanation for certain documented cases. It was the work of an unofficial group, circulated privately and then as a magazine supplement.
The 2026 colloquium sits in the same institutional ecosystem, COMETA’s contributors came from GEPAN, SEPRA, CNES and the defence-studies institute IHEDN, but inverts COMETA’s method and its mode. Where COMETA reached a conclusion and delivered it in private, the colloquium begins from a refusal to conclude and will be held in public and on camera. The COMETA report itself resurfaced this year inside the first tranche of the United States PURSUE programme, which has been the catalyst for the current round of allied activity. The archive records the contrast between the two French initiatives without ranking them.
What the archive will record
As of mid-June the colloquium is scheduled but not yet held. What can be documented now is its framing, its organisers, its institutional backing, and the methodological posture its participants have stated in advance. The substance, the statements made in the Salle Victor-Hugo and any policy direction that follows, belongs to the event itself.
The proceedings are to be filmed, and the archive will record what is said once the transcript and recording are available. For the wider institutional picture, see the archive’s government records coverage and the work of Jacques Vallee, who has taken part in GEIPAN’s scientific workshops. The French reading room holds the GEPAN and GEIPAN documents that the colloquium’s forty-nine-year lineage produced.
Quotations from French sources are given in the original where the wording matters, with English translation, and are attributed to the outlet that reported them.
