GEIPAN Case 2014-06-50078 — ETRELLES (35) 01.06.2014

Brief

On 1 June 2014 at approximately 21:12 UTC, witnesses traveling in a service vehicle near Etrelles (Ille-et-Vilaine, France) observed a dark mass bearing two small faint lights that abruptly accelerated and vanished. GEIPAN classified the case D1 — unexplained — after a field investigation confirmed the witness accounts and exhausted conventional hypotheses. The single extractable page is a BOAM meteor-network data export logging two camera stations (GRA1c and LITIK1) that recorded a sporadic event at exactly 21:12:30 UT, with magnitudes of -1.1 and +0.1, durations under 1.2 seconds, and divergent angular speeds of 20 and 12 degrees per second. The BOAM printout was retrieved 15 September 2014, roughly three months after the incident, consistent with a hypothesis-elimination workflow; the persistent D1 status indicates the meteor candidate did not account for the described phenomenon.

Metadata

Agency

GEIPAN / CNES

Release

2007-03-22

Type

PDF • .pdf

Length

1 pages

Classification

D1 (Inexpliqué)

Programs

GEIPAN, BOAM, GEPAN, SEPRA

Tags

dark mass, two faint lights, sudden acceleration, disappearance, nocturnal, Etrelles, Ille-et-Vilaine, France, 2014, GEIPAN D1, BOAM sporadic

Key points

• GEIPAN assigned classification D1 (inexpliqué) after a full field investigation, placing the case at the agency's highest anomaly tier — confirmed sighting, no conventional explanation.p.1
• Witnesses in a service vehicle ('voiture de service') — likely gendarmes, given the accompanying gendarmerie procès-verbaux — observed a dark mass with two small faint lights that made a sudden extreme-speed departure and disappeared.p.1
• BOAM camera GRA1c recorded a sporadic event at 21:12:30 UT: duration 0.620 s, angular speed 20.17 °/s, magnitude -1.1, moving from azimuth 109.45° to 126.79°.p.1
• BOAM camera LITIK1 recorded the same timestamp at 1.120 s duration, 12.66 °/s, magnitude +0.1, starting from azimuth 270.95° — a track geometry inconsistent with GRA1c if both viewed the same single object.p.1
• The divergent azimuths and angular speeds between the two BOAM cameras complicate a clean single-meteor attribution and likely contributed to the D1 outcome.p.1
• The BOAM export is the final page of a four-page printout (labeled '4 sur 4') retrieved on 15 September 2014 at 18:42, documenting the hypothesis-testing chain.p.1

Verbatim

• Base de donnée des Observateurs Amateurs de Météores

  p.1

• Fichiers Date Heure (UT) type caméra durée (s) vitesse (°/s) mag az db ev db az fin ev fin asc db dc db asc fin dc fin

  p.1

• 01/06/2014 21:12:30 SPO GRA1c 0.620 20.17 -1.1 109.45 48.24 126.79 44.33 254.56 24.48 247.12 14.04

  p.1

• 01/06/2014 21:12:30 SPO LITIK1 1.120 12.66 0.1 270.95 30.71 256.47 24.80 145.21 23.19 150.73 10.12

  p.1

• 4 sur 4 15/09/2014 18:42

  p.1

Most interesting

• GEIPAN — operated under CNES, the French national space agency — is the only standing statutory government body in the world with a formal mandate to investigate and classify UAP reports.
• All French military and gendarmerie personnel are legally required to report UAP sightings to GEIPAN, giving service-vehicle witness accounts elevated evidentiary weight over civilian reports.
• A magnitude -1.1 object recorded by GRA1c would be roughly as bright as Jupiter at opposition — conspicuous against any clear nocturnal sky — making the witness description of a 'dark mass with two small faint lights' phenomenologically atypical for a meteor.
• The 3-month lag between the 1 June incident and the 15 September BOAM retrieval suggests GEIPAN investigators pursued the meteor hypothesis as a secondary check rather than an immediate dismissal.
• GEIPAN's predecessor units — GEPAN (1977) and SEPRA (1988) — make it one of the longest-running national UAP programs; D1 classifications from any era carry the weight of institutional scientific review.