Sighting in Fauville, April 23, 1978

On a Sunday evening, an operations duty officer at air base 105 in Evreux was alerted by a phone call and spotted a red point of light in the sky, between 10° and 15° above the horizon, roughly toward 300 from the base. The lookout staff saw it too, and its brightness faded. The officer asked for radar help, and at 20:44 UT it picked up an echo at 300 from the station, 18 nautical miles away, then moving toward 330 at an estimated 30 to 40 knots. Visual observation and radar tracking both ended at 20:51 UT, about sixteen minutes after the observation began.

The officer wrote the report the next day. The radar report gives the 24th instead of the 23rd, which appears to be a typing error, so the visual sighting and the radar trace seem to have been simultaneous, although the recording is not available. The echo was very weak (1/5) but lasted a long time (7 minutes). Only one witness account was collected.

The investigation ruled out a helicopter and a balloon. Venus was very visible that evening and fairly close in the sky (azimuth 296° to 299°, elevation 4° down to 1.5°), yet the officer did not mention it; since the phenomenon's position was clearly different, a mix-up with Venus seems extremely unlikely. The radar measurement, weak and not confirmed by the Cinq-Mars-La-Pile radar, has to be treated with caution, and a false echo, such as a secondary reflection, cannot be excluded. GEIPAN classed the case D1: a moderately strange phenomenon, observed at a distance, but with a consistent witness account.