An open record of things people cannot explain

Gard, France · 2014-07-08 · from the GEIPAN archive

An account in Gard, France

On July 8, 2014 at 9:33 PM, a witness is intrigued by the straight-line passage of a very bright rectangular shape. During the 6 to 8 seconds of observation, the fast object moves silently. No other testimony has been collected. The witness observes a yellow rectangle advancing above the horizon. The sun has been set for 8 minutes. The witness looks toward the southeast, and sees the object pass from left to right (see his drawings). An airplane, lit from the side by the setting sun, appears as a very bright rectangle (the wings do not receive the sun's rays directly; the fin, flat, reflects the sun in a different direction than the cylindrical fuselage). The gray halo around the object may be an atmospheric optical phenomenon, fairly complex at low elevation, or a local glare phenomenon at the level of the observer's eye. The Flightradar data indicates a candidate airplane for this observation: flight AF Orly-Marseille on approach to Marignane. GEIPAN classifies this case "A": observation of an airplane at sunset.

 

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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.