Hautes-Pyrénées, France · 2017-05-22 · from the GEIPAN archive
On May 22, 2017 at around 9:45 PM, a witness observed from his window, looking toward Tarbes, an orange trail in the sky. He thought it was an airplane trail, but the thickness and especially the curve described intrigued him: the witness then thought of an airplane in difficulty. The witness took a series of photographs and contacted two gendarmerie stations. No other testimony was collected. Analysis of the photograph and of the oddities noted by the witness (width and dissipation time of the trail) leads to establishing a hypothesis of an airplane performing a fuel dump (see the investigation report). These same analyses make it possible to establish scenarios for the airplane's position and speed. The commercial airliner hypothesis cannot be retained because such an airplane should have been found on public aircraft tracking sites, and especially because such a fuel dump operation corresponds to a flight diversion and should have left a trace. On the other hand, in the case of a military aircraft, it is normal that it does not appear in public records, nor in the CNOA radar data, because that data had been collected over too short a distance and can no longer be obtained after a two-month period. The CNOA could not provide an operational record of the fuel dump; however, the search was too late (after the investigation time needed to point toward the hypothesis) to be able to conduct it across all squadrons in France. Moreover, such an operation did not necessarily get recorded, because it is not always a critical operation in the case of a military aircraft. In this context, the absence of a record of a military aircraft and of a fuel dump operation does not invalidate the hypothesis, which should therefore be retained due to the strong consistency of the visual aspects (witness and photo) and of possible trajectory reconstructions (photo analysis). The consistency is good, with a precise testimony and photos that could be exploited. Consequently, GEIPAN classifies the case as B: probable observation of a kerosene dump by a military aircraft, occurring at high altitude (presumably to limit environmental impacts on the population).
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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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