Sighting in Calais, January 9, 1981

Around 9 a.m., three people working in a retirement home saw an elongated, yellow-red object crossing the sky from east to west. It moved very fast and made no sound. The sighting lasted three to four minutes and was interrupted whenever clouds hid the object. Two of the witnesses had already seen the same phenomenon the day before. One of them said it looked very far away, deep in the sky, resembled a cigar, a circle or an oval, seemed at one point to be cut in two, and that two white trails appeared before it vanished.

The case was first classified D. After a re-examination, GEIPAN reclassified it as B. The shape, the fiery colour and the movement all match an aircraft's condensation trail at high altitude, lit by a low sun near the horizon, an effect GEIPAN has since documented in many photographs. The mention of white trails points the same way, and a turn by the aircraft could explain the impression of an object cut in two. The aircraft could not be identified so long afterwards: it could have been 50 to 150 km east of Calais, in an area that already had heavy air traffic in 1981. The buildings were demolished starting in 2013, so the witnesses' exact position is unknown. Their account has little quantified detail and comes from three people who were not independent of one another, so it is not very consistent, but its qualitative elements are distinctive enough to support the explanation.