An account in Occitanie, France

On March 17, 1997, around 8 a.m., several witnesses and aircraft crews observed the passage of a green rocket whose descending trajectory and descriptions suggested an atmospheric reentry or the reentry of space debris. The same day, but around 8:30 p.m., a market gardener observed a luminous phenomenon made up of two white lights. Wanting to illuminate this phenomenon with his lamp, the witness then observed the extinction of the white lights. These were replaced by a light aimed at him as if to observe him. When this light went out, the other two came back on. Then, tilting to the side, an object gained a little altitude and left at a dazzling speed. The whole observation lasted 5 to 7 minutes. No noise was noticed. Another witness reported at the same time the relatively slow passage of an elongated orange luminous phenomenon. For this new observation, none of the crews flying in the sector at that time noticed anything. The two observations were the subject of a single summary report. This second phenomenon remains unexplained.

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This is an official case file of GEIPAN, the French space agency's unidentified aerospace phenomena office, machine translated from French. The original text and the full investigation file are at geipan.fr. We reproduce it with thanks and remove anything on request.