Sighting in Avon-les-Roches, September 1, 1980

During a holiday camp on the theme of experimental rockets, run by the ANSTJ, a witness was watching the flight of a rocket named Fuch Off through binoculars. The rocket seemed to vanish, as if absorbed by a spherical object, which was itself being chased by two fighter jets. The witness only reported this to the GEIPAN in July 2015, thirty-five years after the event. The report was unusual all the more because it concerned a launch of educational micro-rockets carried out under the responsibility of the CNES and the ANSTJ.

The GEIPAN carried out an internal CNES investigation to trace people who had taken part in or watched the event. Despite the time elapsed, it found one of the people in charge of the launch, who had kept all the archives from that period and wrote a detailed account. The rocket was never recovered because the vegetation on the site was very dense. This account says nothing about the sphere the witness described. Fighter jets did fly at that time, but their flight had no connection with the launch of Fuch Off.

The GEIPAN has no other hypothesis for the silver sphere than a mistaken identification of a pilot balloon, a small-diameter balloon whose path, seen from the ground, shows the wind's speed and direction. The launch, the sphere's passage and the jets' flight would therefore have coincided by chance. The head of operations mentioned no particular problem and no other sighting of the sphere, despite the large number of spectators. The case is therefore classified B, a probable misidentification of a balloon.