Sighting in Orléans, November 1, 2007

The witness, a passenger in a car on the RN 152 national road during a journey from Seine-et-Marne to Tours, noticed an object in the sky between 11:15 and 11:30. It looked like a hang glider. It changed shape, spun on itself and did not seem to be held by a cable. It then entered a nearby cloud and disappeared. The witness took five digital photographs. The driver saw nothing. A child in the back seat saw the object but was not called on to give a statement. The witness and their father, a former pilot, could not explain what they had seen. No other testimony was gathered.

The witness reported the sighting to a gendarmerie brigade, and the GEIPAN questionnaire was not filled in. The brigade examined the photos. The object's appearance varied from one picture to another (dome, parallelogram). It was dark, even black, with "metallic" reflections on its upper part that were visible in only some of the shots. A cumulonimbus was present, the cloud the object had entered. No aircraft or paraglider was found on the ground and no accident was reported. Air Base 123 stated that there had been no air movement at that place and time, and the departmental weather services said that no meteorological aerial equipment appeared to have been deployed in the preceding days.

The investigation ruled out a piloted object. No civil aircraft flies through a cumulonimbus, because of electrical activity, wind shear and loss of visibility. An aircraft that had entered the cloud would also have been forced down by downdrafts, and nothing was reported on the ground. The air base's answers excluded a military aircraft. The hypothesis retained was an unpiloted object: a tethered balloon or a helikite, a mix of kite and tethered balloon. The shapes described (hang glider, dome, parallelogram) are typical of such devices. Its apparent disappearance could be explained in three ways: it was destroyed, it passed behind the cloud, or its operator reeled it in on the line without the witness noticing, since the cloud hid it. Its presence at about 2,000 m over an urban area could be due to an event that had authorised it, or to a broken line that took it out of its usual area of use. GEIPAN classified the case as B: tethered balloon or helikite.