An account in Haute-Loire, France

On September 20, 1956 at 3:50 PM, two pilots from a patrol in flight observed the movement of a spherical object with an aluminum color. Intrigued and intending to get closer to it, the pilots gained altitude and realized it was impossible to catch up to it. They abandoned the chase at 4:10 PM. Following a request to the director of the Puy-de-Dôme observatory in Clermont-Ferrand (63), it turned out that a translucent balloon, roughly spherical in shape with a slight bulge at its base, had been observed throughout the day of September 20 in the sky over Clermont. It drifted constantly at very low speed at an altitude of 20 km before becoming invisible at 7:05 PM, no longer being lit by the sun. The observatory does not know the origin of the object, stating that the regional weather services and they themselves had not released any balloon. GEIPAN classifies this case as B: observation of a stratospheric balloon whose origin was not found. The impression of being followed by the object and the impossibility of getting closer to it are characteristic of perception illusions when observing a distant object. In our case, the balloon, very large, was about 17 km from the pilots. Closing in at an altitude of 32,000 feet (10,000 meters) only reduced this distance to about 10 km, which remains significant.