France.Orange-Caritat · two fighter pilots chase a silver object

On the morning of June 15, 1951, a patrol of the 5th Fighter Wing took off southwards from Air Base 115 at Orange-Caritat, in the Vaucluse, for a training flight in de Havilland Vampire jet fighters. There were three aircraft, because the fourth one planned could not start up. The tower logged the take-off at 10:23 universal time (11:23 by French clocks of the day). A few minutes later the aircraft leading the patrol, flown by a staff sergeant, or sergent-chef, reported that the green light for its left landing gear was still on: the door had not closed. The other two pilots (a lieutenant instructor commanding the flight and another staff sergeant) flew S-turns around it so as not to lose sight of it, at about 6,000 feet (about 1,800 meters) and north of the airfield. As the light stayed on, the lieutenant ordered it to land.

In one of those turns the staff sergeant flying as number two saw, to his right and somewhat higher, something he took for an aircraft. Looking more carefully he saw it was not moving: it seemed circular or spherical, silver in color and very bright, with no visible relief. He alerted the lieutenant, who, with the patrol leader heading back to base, took the lead of the patrol and set course toward the object, on 080, while continuing to climb. For about two minutes the object did not seem to move; as they closed in its round shape was confirmed and its brightness made them take off their sunglasses. At about 10,000 feet (about 3,000 meters) the lieutenant had the impression of being level with it: the object stood out south of the Pelvoux massif, at the height of its snowy summits.

Then, according to the reports, the object changed: it abruptly took an elongated shape and began to move away to the east, climbing at a shallow angle. The pilots chased it on the same heading, at a speed that never fell below 250 knots (about 460 km/h) and climbing to 16,000 feet (about 4,900 meters). The object grew ever smaller; they lost it, it reappeared as a dot on the horizon and vanished completely after some six minutes of pursuit, when the aircraft were over Serres, in the Petit Buëch valley. The lieutenant noted that he never had to change heading from the moment the object began to move.

The colonel commanding the base questioned the two pilots an hour and a half later and, on June 19, sent their reports to the commanders of the 1st Air Division and the 4th Air Region. He described them as experienced, level-headed airmen without an overactive imagination, and stressed that their accounts were identical. He summarized the observations: an object first motionless and spherical at about 10,000 feet over the Serres-Veynes-Aspres area, then oblong and moving east, with a rate of climb and a horizontal speed greater than the Vampires'.

He asked the Hautes-Alpes Gendarmerie to find out whether it had been seen from the ground. On June 25 the general of the 4th Region forwarded the file to the General Staff in Paris under the subject "strange craft moving in the airspace of Orange-Caritat air base". The file was retrieved in 1959 from the General Staff archives and is now published by GEIPAN, the French space agency's aerial-phenomena study unit, with the classification "D": strange and consistent phenomenon, unidentified.

The Orange-Caritat file survived almost intact: it keeps the two individual accounts, written the same day and before the pilots could compare them in writing, and the synthesis by the colonel who questioned them. The accounts agree on the essentials and differ in details (who saw it first, at what height each was). The case moved up the chain of command, from base to region to General Staff, labeled as a technical matter.

The most natural explanation for a silver, bright and apparently motionless object in broad daylight in 1951 is a high-altitude stratospheric balloon: in those years plastic balloons were being launched that, lit by the Sun, look like silver spheres and seem still. Aircraft climbing toward them often have the impression of closing in and then of seeing them move away, because the balloon is much higher and farther than it looks. GEIPAN itself acknowledges that several descriptions suggest a balloon seen from afar, but rejects the hypothesis because one of the pilots describes a rapid departure when he tried to close in. Nor do the change to an elongated shape and the steady departure eastwards fit a balloon well: it would only reproduce them with a strong wind and a perspective effect.

Both a conventional misidentification (a balloon, with the illusion of distance typical of these chases) and the possibility of an experimental craft remain open, at a time when France and its allies were testing high-altitude balloons and vehicles. But the official French classification is "unidentified". GEIPAN publishes the full file and explains which hypothesis it evaluated and why it rejects it.