More Local "X-Files"

Written by The Var Reporter

We delve once again into the files of CNES (Centre National d’Etudes Spatiales), to bring you more local UFO stories...

THE STRANGE CASE OF FLIGHT AF3532

It was 13h14 on the 28th January 1994, when the chief steward of an Air France A300, flying between Nice and London, alerted the Captain of the plane to the presence of a strange object in the sky, on the left side of the aircraft.

The pilot, Jean-Charles Duboc, and his copilot, Valérie Chauffour, took turns to view the object and both agreed it resembled nothing they knew or could readily identify. Furthermore, its form seemed to change constantly; one moment looking like a dark brown bell hanging in the sky, the next, appearing to transform into a lighter brown disc-shaped object.

At the time of the sighting, the plane was cruising over the Seine-et-Marne at a speed of 650km/h and at an altitude of 11,900m. Visibility and meterological conditions were excellent and Captain Duboc estimated the altitude of the object at around 10,500m. He judged it was around 50km away. He also said that, in his informed opinion, it was BIG.

The members of the Air France team watched the object for about one minute before it suddenly disappeared, so suddenly that it was as if it had become invisible, rather than flown away.

Meanwhile, on the ground - or under the ground, to be more exact - in a French Armée de l’Air bunker at Taverny, the strange object was also registering on radar screens. Archives show that the object was recorded for around 50 seconds and its trajectory crossed that of flight AF3532. Their records also show that the object was not following any known flight plan. It disappeared from the radar screens at the same moment that the pilot and his crew in the air claimed it had disappeared in front of their eyes.

Investigations have allowed authorities to rule-out the hypothesis of a weather balloon and, by calculating the precise distance of the place where the trajectories of the Airbus and the object crossed, they were able to deduce that the object on the radar screen must have had a length of about 250m.

But, while investigators have been able to say with some certainty what the object wasn’t, no one has been able to say what it actually was, making it another officially unexplained sighting.

DRAGUIGNAN - 6th October 1952

The pilot and copilot of a DC-4, flying the regular service between London-Orly-Nice, reported seeing a kind of white, luminous egg-shaped object in the sky over Draguignan.

The pilot, François Cavasse, was reported as saying that, at 19h28, his copilot, Michel Clément, drew his attention to an object which resembled “an elongated egg”, larger than a transporter plane, flying in a straight, horizontal line at a speed which was at least two or three times superior to that of which a jet aircraft at full throttle would have been capable.

The two men observed the object for 30 seconds before it was lost to their view and they noticed that it left behind a trail of white smoke, tinged with blue, which looked like a dotted line in the sky.

(Jimmy Guieu: “Les S.V. Viennent d’un Autre Monde” - Fleuve Noir 1954 - Réédition Omnium Littéraire 1972, p.86-87).

STRANGE SIGHTINGS AT MARIGNANE

At around 2.30am on the morning of 27th October 1952, Gabriel Gachignard, a customs officer at Marignane Airport, observed a disc-like luminous object glide between two hangars within the airport complex and come to a standstill on a runway, about one hundred metres away from where he was standing. Mr. Gachignard described the object as metallic-looking, about 4.50m long and 1 metre thick at the centre, with half a dozen small, square windows around the middle, from which shone a soft, yellow light.

Wanting to get a closer look, Mr. Gachignard ran towards the object. When he was about 50m away, he took out his pistol and approached more cautiously. At which point, the object emitted a shower of sparks and took off at lightning speed, without displacing the air around it. The object flew away at such a low altitude that Mr. Gachignard said it barely cleared the airport’s boundary barricade.

(M. Figuet/J.L. Ruchon: “Ovni, le Premier Rapport Complet...” - Alain Lefeuvre 1979, p. 61, 62).

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It was around 9pm on the 4th of January 1954 when Mr. Chesneau, a pompier on duty in one of the hangars, saw a round, luminous object land on one of the airport runways at Marignane airport. Mr. Chesneau telephoned the control tower to alert them but, as he did so, the object swiftly took off again and disappeared.
An investigation was launched and authorities subsequently discovered numerous metallic items of apparent debris on the runway, including several small, curved stems or wires, about 15cm long and with a ball slightly larger than a marble on the end.

(Henry Durrant: “Le Livre Noir des S.V.” - Laffont 1970, p.117-118).

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Articles from The Riviera Reporter Var Supplement, issue October/November 2007.

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