Sighting in Paris, August 24, 1997

On a Sunday at 8:01 pm, a witness saw two unidentified aerial phenomena (PAN) in the sky over Paris and photographed them. They contacted a scientific magazine, which advised them to notify the DGAC. The DGAC alerted the staff headquarters of the Gendarmerie des transports aériens, and the Paris brigade was tasked with an investigation. Gendarmes went to the witness's home, took their statement and viewed the nine slides the witness had had processed at a private laboratory. Eight of them were then examined by the Gendarmerie's central photographic laboratory and later by its criminal research institute. The witness was questioned again several weeks later and handed over a sketch. SEPRA carried out its own study in 1998 and classified the case D, because it was hard to separate what the witness saw, what the slides showed, what a paper print made after cleaning the slides showed, and what the witness said afterwards.

GEIPAN's re-examination established that the phenomenon the witness described does not appear on the slides: the boomerang-shaped mark that had caught the gendarmes' attention was a residue from the developing chemicals. One paper print happened to contain an artefact shaped like a hollow pentahedron, which does not exist on the slide. The witness, who was not told what it was, did not connect it with what they had seen. Yet in later accounts, the object, first described as like a greasy paper blown by the wind with jagged corners, became a five-sided pentahedron, which points to false memories. No usable data exist on the object's angular size or elevation, and investigators took no measurements at the site. What little information there is fits a light object carried by the wind, which blew in the direction of the observed movement. GEIPAN therefore reclassified the case as C, the testimony being unusable for lack of reliable information.