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CNES was put in charge of launching an official investigation into the UFO phenomenon in France, under the auspices of a new internal agency then called GEPAN. [3] I soon learned why CNES set up this department— France had been dealing with the question of unidentified aerospace It began in 1951, when three Air Force pilots flying separate Vampire F-5B fighters encountered a shiny, silvery round object. Two tried to close in on it, but it was much faster than they were. A UFO wave followed in 1954, in which gendarmes throughout metropolitan France collected over 100 official reports of "flying saucers," some of which were classified as "close encounters." In one instance, observed by several thousand people, something strange flew back and forth over Tananarive, which today is Antananarivo, the capital of the island of Madagascar. The witnesses were shopping at the outdoor market in the early evening, and were frozen in place and flabbergasted by what they saw. They described a kind of green ball the size of an airplane, followed by a metallic object shaped like a rugby ball. Dogs were running and howling throughout the city and oxen panicked and destroyed the fences of their enclosures. Most extraordinary was the fact that, during the flight over the capital by this phenomenon, the public power system went off and came back on a few minutes later, after the departure of the "large green ball" and its apparent companion. As might be expected, there was a public outcry and much coverage in the press, all of which prompted an investigation by the French government authorities. Twenty years later, in 1974, the Defense Minister, Robert Galley, declared on national radio that there existed an unexplained phenomenon that needed to be studied. At the time, I had no idea I would become so involved with this investigation. Our first task at GEPAN, I realized, was to establish a network of police, gendarmerie, Air Force, Navy, meteorologists, and aviation officials and a methodology so that data from sightings could be reported and centralized. A scientific council comprised of astronomers, physicists, legal experts, and other eminent citizens met annually to evaluate and direct studies. This first phase, from 1977 to 1983, reached three basic conclusions, which still remain valid: The vast majority of UFO reports can be explained after rigorous analysis. However, some phenomena cannot be explained in terms of conventional physics, psychology, or social psychology. It seems highly probable that this small percentage of unidentified aerospace phenomena have a physical basis. I gradually developed an expertise in these studies, and beginning in 1983 was placed in charge of GEPAN. Following these initial steps, we undertook to develop a more theoretical but still rigorous approach to these studies. It was clear at the outset that it would be necessary to consider aw phenomena for more than twenty-five years. both the physical and psychological nature of the phenomenon. In order to