Jean-Jacques Velasco

Jean-Jacques Velasco is a French researcher, trained in optics technology, who joined the newly formed GEPAN team at the French space agency CNES in 1977 at the invitation of founding director Claude Poher, bringing technical expertise in image and instrument analysis to France's pioneering government UFO investigation effort. Velasco went on to direct GEPAN and then its successor agency, SEPRA (Service for Expertise in Atmospheric Re-entry Phenomena), serving as the head of France's official government UFO study program for roughly two decades, from the late 1980s until 2004, making him the longest-serving director in the program's history. In a marked departure from the officially neutral, non-committal public posture that had characterized the agency under his predecessors, Velasco stated publicly, including in his book, that a meaningful percentage of investigated cases remained genuinely unexplained and that he personally believed the evidence pointed toward an extraterrestrial origin for at least some UFO phenomena, a position highly unusual for a sitting government program director anywhere in the world. This public stance reportedly led CNES leadership to reassign him to another department as a form of institutional sanction, illustrating the tension between rigorous scientific investigation and the political sensitivity of publicly endorsed conclusions, even within France's uniquely institutionalized UFO research tradition. Velasco remains an active commentator on French and international UAP developments.