France Has Been Investigating UFOs Since 1977. Quietly.

The American conversation treats government UAP investigation as a recent and contested innovation. Most of the rest of the world settled the question decades ago, and quietly.

**France** has run the longest continuously operating state UAP programme on Earth. Founded in 1977 as GEPAN inside CNES, the national space agency, reorganised as SEPRA in 1988 and renamed GEIPAN in 2005, it is a civilian-led, publicly transparent investigation unit that has been taking reports and publishing case files for nearly fifty years. 2

**Brazil, Argentina and Chile** all maintain formal bodies. The Brazilian Air Force has documented and released reports on aerial phenomena since 1954, and logged 80 pilot sightings in 2023 alone. 9

**Japan** moved recently and deliberately. In June 2024 roughly ninety lawmakers from ruling and opposition parties formed a nonpartisan parliamentary caucus on UAP, chaired by former Defence Minister Yasukazu Hamada. Their framing was security, not wonder: unidentified objects could be foreign weapons or reconnaissance platforms. 34 Japan's defence ministry had standardised its own reporting procedure in April 2020.

**Canada** commissioned a review. In 2025 the Sky Canada Project, run out of the Office of the Chief Science Advisor, recommended designating a federal body to standardise, collect and investigate public UAP reports — the first government-sanctioned Canadian study in decades. 567

The gap Europe has not closed

Against that, Europe has a striking hole. More than 5,000 UAP sightings were reported across sixteen European countries in a single recent year — collected not by any government, but by twenty-three independent civilian organisations. There is no EU-level system to receive or analyse them. 8

A continent that scrambled fighters over unidentified drones in 2025 has no shared mechanism for logging what its citizens see in the sky.

Why the American frame misleads

In the United States this subject is argued as a scandal: what is being hidden, and by whom. Elsewhere it is largely an administrative question — who takes the report, what happens to it, who publishes the result. 1

France answered that in 1977 and the sky did not fall. The most useful thing in the global record is not a sighting. It is the demonstration that a state can run an open UAP office for half a century without either proving anything or embarrassing itself. 2