Sighting in Saint-Sulpice-de-Royan, February 25, 1985

Two farmers were each working on one of their plots when an object fell into a field, less than 50 m from one of them. It bounced several times before coming to rest. It was so hot that it could not be touched for an hour. It was a cylinder about 50 cm long and roughly fifteen centimetres in diameter.

The first inquiries, carried out by the Rochefort air base, could not identify it: it matched no French or foreign missile, and no radioactivity was detected. The GEPAN found no military activity that could explain the fall. The search then turned to space objects that might have re-entered the atmosphere that day. NASA and NORAD replied that a piece of the propulsion stage of the satellite COSMOS 1629, launched on 21 February, had probably come down around the 25th. The GEPAN provisionally concluded that a fragment of the fourth-stage booster from that launch had re-entered.

The air base nevertheless handed the object over to the GEPAN for a more thorough analysis, which was carried out later by the Centre de Recherches et d'Etudes d'Arcueil. Markings on the object showed it was of German origin and bore the marks of the Third Reich. The space-debris explanation was therefore dropped: the object was a propulsion element abandoned since the war that had ignited spontaneously. Further examinations identified it as the rear part of a surface-to-surface "fog launcher" device. Its launch point, with ignition caused by heat or a slight impact, was estimated at 3,300 to 3,600 m northwest of the impact, in a marshy area where the German army had dumped many munitions at the end of the war, when it was encircled in the Royan pocket. The investigation, which lasted nearly 5 years, was classified A.