Pilot witness in Seine-et-Marne, France

On January 28, 1994 at 1:14 PM, the crew of an Air France Airbus A320-11 on the Nice-London route observed a phenomenon they could not explain. While flying over the Coulommiers region in Seine-et-Marne, the chief steward, who was then in the cockpit, pointed out to the captain a phenomenon on the left side of the aircraft that made him think of a weather balloon. The captain and the co-pilot for their part described observing a brown or dark red disc that changed shape before suddenly disappearing. The captain reported it to Reims air traffic control, which told him there was no air traffic in the sector. At the same time, an unidentified radar track was recorded by the Cinq-Mars-la-Pile radar. This track, recorded for 50 seconds, did cross the path of flight AF3532 but matched no filed flight plan and disappeared at the same time as the crew's sighting and from the radar screens. Three years later, when the case was cited in the press, the witnesses gave their testimony in an official report to the gendarmerie and to SEPRA (Service for Expertise of Rare Aerospace Phenomena at CNES). The investigators remained cautious about the correlation between the radar signature and the phenomenon. Even if the radar signature does not match the observation, the phenomenon was not an aircraft, since in that case there would have been a matching radar track. In 2012, a new check was requested from Meteo-France to study the hypothesis of observing a sounding balloon (see attached). A sounding balloon did cross the aircraft's path, but one hour before the observation. And at the time of the observation, the balloon, having burst, would have been descending far to the southeast of the aircraft. This case therefore turns out to be unexplained, with consistent testimonies for a completely strange observation. Two hypotheses could at a stretch still be considered but cannot be confirmed: a still unknown atmospheric optical phenomenon, or a flexible object (e.g., a balloon envelope) flying with the winds. This case is classified D1: a moderately consistent unexplained case with a marked strangeness character. The late testimonies, the absence of the steward's testimony, and the radar track inconsistent with the observed object reduce the consistency of the case.