An account in Yvelines, France

On October 1, 2011 at around 5 p.m., four people sitting in the garden of a house in Carrières-Sous-Poissy (78) were frightened by the sight of an oval-shaped object falling rapidly from the sky. Shaped like a "capsule," the object was horizontal, oscillating, and rotating on itself. It was gray in color and metallic in appearance. The witnesses, afraid of being crushed, left the garden and fled by car. They alerted passersby who saw nothing, as the sky was then hidden by trees. The witnesses stopped near a stadium a few hundred meters away, looked behind them, but could no longer see anything. Another person met by the main witness said they had seen the craft head toward Triel-Sur-Seine (78) in a north-northwest direction. The highly intrigued witnesses went back home. Given that the object moved in the direction of the wind (see investigation report), the hypothesis of a lighter-than-air balloon is favored. The tube shape is known to some enthusiasts. The movement, spinning and following the wind, is consistent with this hypothesis. The gray plastic film used for these balloons gives a metallic appearance once inflated and exposed to sunlight. The size and distance of the object could not be precisely estimated by the witnesses, who had never seen this kind of object. This "modest" size (on the order of 3 m) also explains why so few witnesses noticed it. GEIPAN classifies this case as "B": probable observation of a tubular thermal balloon.