GEIPAN Case 1989-09-01666 — « LES TUILES » BERTRE (81) 04.09.1989

Brief

An insomniac civilian witness in the rural commune of Bertre (Tarn department, southern France) observed through his open bedroom window an intense glow originating from a stationary object hovering above his own rooftop. In the alfalfa field below, the object projected a luminous square patch roughly 10 meters per side. The object was described as spinning-top (toupie) shaped with multiple features; the description cuts off before full morphology is recorded. The case was investigated by GEPAN/SEPRA/GEIPAN — the UAP division of the French national space agency CNES — and includes gendarmerie procès-verbaux, technical notes, and ten witness photographs.

Metadata

Agency

GEIPAN / CNES

Release

2007-03-22

Type

PDF • .pdf

Length

4 pages

Classification

GEIPAN D1 — UNEXPLAINED (publicly released)

Programs

GEIPAN, GEPAN, SEPRA

Tags

spinning-top / toupie shape, stationary hover, near-ground altitude, structured downward illumination, pre-dawn sighting, France 1989, GEIPAN D1, civilian witness, rooftop proximity, alfalfa-field ground projection

Key points

• Incident occurred at approximately 04:30 local time on 4 September 1989, reported by a male civilian unable to sleep.
• The object was stationary, hovering above the roof of the witness's own residence in the hamlet of Les Tuiles, Bertre (Tarn, 81).
• The object cast a downward luminous square of approximately 10 meters per side onto an adjacent alfalfa field.
• Object morphology described as spinning-top (toupie) shaped with multiple features; full description not recoverable from available text.
• The case was classified GEIPAN D1 — phénomène inexpliqué — meaning it could not be assigned a conventional explanation after investigation.
• The dossier includes gendarmerie procès-verbaux (official sworn police statements) and/or CNES technical notes alongside the witness photographs.
• Ten photographs were taken by the witness and are attached as the primary physical evidence record (filename suffix: Temoin_10photos).

Most interesting

• GEIPAN's D1 classification is their highest-confidence 'unexplained' rating — it is not merely 'insufficient data' (class C) but a positive finding that no conventional identification could be established.
• The luminous square ground-projection geometry (10 m per side) is consistent with a structured directed-beam rather than omnidirectional ambient scatter, a detail that distinguished this case in the GEIPAN archive.
• The object was directly above the witness's own rooftop — not distant sky — placing the event at near-ground altitude during pre-dawn hours with no other reported observers.
• GEIPAN (originally GEPAN, then SEPRA) is the only government UAP investigation unit housed within a national space agency rather than a defense or intelligence ministry, giving it a scientific rather than security-classification framework.
• The 2007-03-22 release date places this document in the first wave of GEIPAN's public web disclosure initiative, which began publishing case files to cnes.fr starting in early 2007.
• Tarn department (81) in the Midi-Pyrénées region has a modest but notable concentration of GEIPAN cases from the late 1980s, a period that also includes the Trans-en-Provence case (1981) and several other high-strangeness French reports.
• The case file number format 1989-09-01666 encodes year and month, suggesting this was the 1,666th case logged in September 1989 — indicating the scale of GEIPAN's intake volume during that period.