An account in Sarthe, France

GEIPAN continues to publish all of its archives on its public website www.geipan.fr. Among its publications are old cases classified at the time as type "C" cases, which are now being re-examined, with the sole aim of being more relevant in the conclusions. Thanks to new technical means (software) and the investigation experience gained over all these recent years, this re-examination sometimes leads to new remarks or even a change of classification explained in an investigation note. This observation case (formerly named Saint-Calais (72) after the gendarmerie) is one of the cases classified as "C" by GEPAN. On 21 November 1978, shortly after 6:15 a.m., two people observe a circular and red luminous phenomenon that rises at the horizon. This phenomenon moves slowly then diminishes. The gendarmerie, dispatched to the scene at 8 a.m., concluded it was an astronomical observation of Venus; this was only confirmed by GEIPAN in 2013, due to doubt about the exact time of observation because Venus did not rise that day until 6:29 a.m.

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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.