An account in Charente-Maritime, France

On February 25, 1985, two farmers are each working on one of their plots when an object falls into the field less than 50 m from one of them, bouncing several times before coming to a stop. The object is burning hot and cannot be touched for an hour. It is a cylinder about 50 cm long and about fifteen cm in diameter. The first investigations carried out by the Rochefort air base fail to identify the object, which does not match any type of French or foreign missile. Furthermore, no radioactivity is detected on the recovered object. GEPAN for its part conducts a search, but no military activity can explain the fall of such an object. The search then turns to space objects likely to have re-entered the atmosphere that day. Responses from NASA and NORAD indicate that a piece of the propulsion stage of the COSMOS 1629 satellite, launched on February 21 and referenced 15.575, probably re-entered around the 25th. This information leads GEPAN to the provisional conclusion of the atmospheric re-entry of a piece of the 4th stage propulsion unit from the COSMOS 1629 launch. The object is however handed over to GEPAN by the air base for later in-depth analysis. These in-depth expert examinations are launched later and carried out by the Arcueil Research and Study Centre, which reveal indications and markings proving that the object is of German origin and bears the markings of the Third Reich. GEPAN's first conclusion is therefore abandoned in favor of the hypothesis of a propulsion element of unknown origin, abandoned since the last war and which spontaneously caught fire. Additional expert examinations made it possible, on the one hand, to identify the device as the rear part of a ground-to-ground "fog launcher" and, on the other hand, to show that the starting point of this device, whose ignition could have occurred by thermal effect or following a slight impact, can be estimated at between 3300 and 3600 meters northwest of the impact point, which moreover corresponds to a marsh area where the German army, at the end of the Second World War, submerged numerous munitions while it was surrounded in the Royan pocket. This investigation, which spanned nearly 5 years, is a model of its kind in its evolution and its successive twists and turns.