Sighting in « Af3532 » [aero Afr] Coulommiers, January 28, 1994

The crew of an Air France Airbus A320 flying from Nice to London saw a phenomenon in early afternoon that they could not explain. The head steward, who was in the cockpit at the time, pointed out an object to the left of the aircraft to the captain, saying it looked like a weather balloon. The captain and the co-pilot described a brown or dark red disc that changed shape and then vanished suddenly. The captain informed Reims air traffic control, who replied that there was no traffic in the sector.

At the same moment, the Cinq-Mars-la-Pile radar recorded an unidentified track lasting 50 seconds. It crossed the flight's path, matched no filed flight plan, and disappeared at the same time the phenomenon vanished from the crew's view and from the radar screens. The witnesses only made an official report to the gendarmerie and to SEPRA three years later, after the case appeared in the press.

The investigators remained cautious about any link between the radar track and the sighting. Even so, the phenomenon could not have been an aircraft, since a matching radar track would then have existed. In 2012, Météo-France was asked to check the weather balloon hypothesis: a balloon did cross the aircraft's path, but an hour earlier, and at the time of the sighting it had burst and was descending far to the southeast. Two hypotheses remain possible but cannot be substantiated: an unknown atmospheric optical phenomenon, or a flexible object, such as a balloon envelope, drifting with the wind. The case was classified D1, unexplained, of moderate consistency with a marked strangeness. The late testimonies, the absence of the steward's account, and the radar track's inconsistency with the observed object weaken its consistency.