An open record of things people cannot explain

Aube, France · 2016-10-02 · from the GEIPAN archive

A triangle shape in Aube, France

On Sunday, October 2, 2016 at 9:57 PM, a witness is on the 4th floor of his apartment. His attention is drawn to 7 to 8 white lights identical to those of airplanes moving across the sky. One light separates from the group, the whole forming a compact triangle. No noise is heard during the observation of about 10 seconds. Only one testimony will be collected. It is highly probable that the observation corresponds to a Falcon aircraft passing at relatively low altitude (4900 m), as shown by the attached reconstruction document showing this passage. The time and direction of passage match exactly (the reading is made in UTC time, which corresponds to 9:59 PM local time). The aircraft passes at its closest at 3800 m from the witness and flies at 4900 m altitude. The angular elevation is 52° when the witness reports 15 to 30°, but this difference is within the typical margin of error for estimating angular elevation by a witness who has no ground references (like "so many times the height of the roof"). One strangeness noted by the witness lies in the description of a series of luminous points. The length of a Falcon is 20 m. The angular size of the aircraft seen at this distance (obtained from altitude and ground distance) is 0.19 degrees, i.e., 40% of the angular size of the Moon (~0.5 degrees). The naked eye can distinguish many details (including craters and seas) within the Moon and even within a 40% portion of the Moon. It is therefore entirely possible that the witness distinguished the Falcon's portholes, especially since these appear with stronger contrast than that of the reliefs on the Moon. The witness is more familiar with airplanes passing higher up, with no possibility of distinguishing anything other than the usual one to three lights without an alignment effect as here. The witness contacted by the investigator validates the angular order of magnitude of the set of lights (that of the Moon). A strangeness more difficult to explain is the presence of the single luminous point above the horizontal line. The strong coincidence on all other points allows maintaining the hypothesis insofar as aircraft can have specific lighting in addition to regulatory lighting (especially for non-commercial jets like here). Note also that this additional light may result from a perception or memory error by the witness. The fact that the aircraft's passage is silent (while the window is open) can be explained by the presence of SW wind recorded on (Infoclimat) blowing (15 to 20 km/h) against the propagation of noise coming from NE (position of the Falcon aircraft). The GEIPAN archives also contain numerous cases where the witness's sound perception is masked by attention or the strangeness arising from visual perception. The perception of aircraft noise a few minutes after the observation probably corresponds to the following aircraft passing West of the witness and benefiting from wind-carried noise (see reconstruction with the two aircraft). Note that the witness does not mention the Falcon's passage, which nevertheless passes at the exact moment of his observation and within his field of view. This also supports the Falcon hypothesis for the UAP. Consequently, GEIPAN classifies the case as A: observation of an aircraft.

What stood out: a triangle shape

 

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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.