Sighting in Vireux-Wallerand, July 20, 2009

Around midday, a witness who was gardening suddenly noticed a shiny, cigar-shaped object with a small fin. It hung motionless and silent above the houses in the neighbourhood. Its front end pointed north-east, but the rest of its shape was hard to make out. The witness described a kind of agitation above the object. The observation lasted about ten minutes, after which the frightened witness went back indoors. They put the object at roughly 10 metres away and about 20 metres wide.

No other testimony was gathered, despite a check with the neighbours, and the gendarmerie received no report of any flight incident. According to the GEIPAN, the object's apparent size and its position, visible without raising the head, should have drawn the attention of people nearby in broad daylight in an urban area. The witness confirmed these points in a second meeting, which rules out any explanatory hypothesis and makes the case even stranger. But a single witness, with no photos or physical traces, is not enough to establish that the sighting is unexplained. Their behaviour also raises questions: they stopped watching to go and eat while the object was still there, even though they had a camera. The case, re-examined after an earlier D1 classification, is therefore classed C: testimony that cannot be used.