Indre-et-Loire, France · 1980-09-01 · from the GEIPAN archive
Pilot witness in Indre-et-Loire, France
Old observation (1980) but recently reported (2015).
During a vacation camp themed "experimental rockets" organized by the ANSTJ, a witness observes with binoculars the disappearance of a rocket named Fuch Off which seems to him to be absorbed by a spherical object itself pursued by two fighter jets.
This observation report is quite unusual: on the one hand, it is an old observation, from 1980, reported to GEIPAN in July 2015, and on the other hand, this observation relates to a launch operation of educational micro-rockets under the responsibility of CNES and ANSTJ.
GEIPAN conducted an internal CNES investigation to find the actors or spectators of this event. The investigation was very difficult after 35 years, but it was still possible to find one of the people in charge of this rocket launch operation, who still had all the launch archives from that period. He wrote a detailed report of this launch (see his report). The rocket was not recovered due to the particularly dense vegetation on the ground. The report mentions nothing concerning the sphere that the witness describes. The flight of the fighter jets at that time did take place but had no connection with the launch of the Fuch Off rocket.
GEIPAN has no other hypothesis for the silvery sphere than that of a possible misidentification with a pilot balloon (a small-diameter balloon whose trajectory, observed from the ground, indicates wind speed and direction). The concurrence between the rocket launch, the passage of the sphere, and that of the fighter jets turns out to be fortuitous. Due to the fact that the operations manager mentions no particular problem nor any other report of this silvery sphere despite the large number of spectators, GEIPAN consequently classifies this case in category B, as a probable misidentification with a balloon.
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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.
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