Department of Flying Saucers | Space Exploration | Air & Space Magazine

Department of Flying Saucers | Space Exploration | Air & Space Magazine: "January 2009. Police in the western French province of Brittany are puzzled by a wave of reports that strange, undulating lights have been drifting across the night sky. They call for a national operative who works out of a small, unmarked office in the southern city of Toulouse. He arrives on the scene swiftly and begins making subtle inquiries, wary as always of spreading panic among the public.

The investigator in this real-life Gallic version of “The X-Files” is Yvan Blanc, a diminutive, balding, 57-year-old engineer who bears a striking resemblance to former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. Until last year, Blanc was a project manager helping launch the European Space Agency’s Herschel Observatory, a job he thought might cap a three-decade career at the French national space agency CNES. Then he got an unexpected offer: to head up the Group for the Study and Information on Unidentified Aerospace Phenomena, or GEIPAN—the French government’s UFO office."