French Ministry of Defense

The French Ministry of the Armed Forces (Ministère des Armées, renamed from Ministère de la Défense in 2017) is the French government department responsible for defence policy, armed forces administration, and military procurement. Based at the Hôtel de Brienne and the Balard site in Paris, it oversees the Armée de Terre, Marine Nationale, Armée de l'Air et de l'Espace, and the Gendarmerie Nationale.

UAP-Related Role

The Ministry coordinates France's state-level engagement with UAP through its oversight of military aviation and its partnership with CNES for the GEIPAN programme. French military UAP reports — particularly pilot, radar, and ground-observer cases — flow through Ministry channels before being evaluated by GEIPAN. The Ministry has maintained an unusually open public stance on UAP, publishing the 1999 COMETA report (Les OVNI et la Défense: à quoi doit-on se préparer?) by former Ministry and IHEDN officials, which concluded that many UAP observations could not be explained by known phenomena.

COMETA and Beyond

The 1999 COMETA report was one of the first Western government-associated reports calling for serious UAP study, and its publication has been cited as a European milestone equivalent to the later US 2021 DNI Preliminary Assessment. The Ministry has continued to support CNES/GEIPAN's transparent public case-database approach.