GEIPAN Case 2023-12-51504 — HEM (59) 16.12.2022

Brief

On 16 December 2022 at approximately 21:00, a civilian walking his dog in a residential estate in HEM (Nord department, northern France) observed three reddish, three-dimensional toroidal rings arranged in an isosceles triangle moving silently on a straight horizontal path from northwest to southeast for roughly ten seconds before vanishing simultaneously, as if extinguished. GEIPAN investigators conducted a remote inquiry followed by an on-site field reconstruction on 25 June 2024, substantially revising the witness's initial angular estimates. All conventional explanations — sky lanterns, aircraft, and drones — were examined and either rejected on physical grounds or left unresolvable because the one-year reporting delay foreclosed CNOA radar retrieval. The report was completed 14 January 2025.

Metadata

Agency

GEIPAN / CNES

Release

2007-03-22

Type

PDF • .pdf

Length

26 pages

Classification

Non sensible

Programs

GEIPAN

Tags

triangular formation, toroidal rings, reddish-orange luminosity, silent, instantaneous simultaneous extinction, France, HEM Nord (59), 2022, D1 unidentified, GEIPAN case 2023-12-51504, PANTONE 179U, visual only

Key points

• Three identical reddish-orange, toroidal (3-D torus, not flat-ring) luminous objects in an isosceles triangle formation, point forward in the direction of travel, observed silently for approximately ten seconds.p.2
• The phenomenon vanished with all three rings extinguishing simultaneously — described as 'comme si les anneaux s'étaient éteints' — without being obscured by any rooftop or vegetation.p.14
• The witness submitted the technical questionnaire (QT) one year after the observation, on 15 December 2023, permanently foreclosing CNOA radar data retrieval from the Centre National des Opérations Aériennes.p.16
• Meteorological data from Lille-Lesquin airport (12 km SW) confirmed no cloud cover but noted mist, -3.2°C temperature, 3.4 km horizontal visibility, and light SE surface wind.p.6
• Sky lantern hypothesis rejected on two independent grounds: toroidal shape is inconsistent with all lantern testimonies in the literature, and surface and upper-level wind directions (SSE/NNE) are incompatible with the NW-to-SE trajectory of the UAP.p.16
• FlightRadar24 and ADS-B Exchange queries found no aircraft moving generally west-to-east in the observation sector at 21:00 ± 10 minutes; all identified traffic was high-altitude airline traffic on a SSW-NNE corridor.p.16
• Thales-theorem distance calculations against a reference list of 16 hobby-drone models placed the UAP within 1.3 m of the witness under a single-object interpretation — physically implausible, indicating a larger or more distant object.p.17
• On-site field reconstruction substantially corrected the QT estimates: initial azimuth revised from ~300° to 347°; final azimuth from ~75° to 96°; initial elevation from ~75° to 36°; maximum elevation reached 50°.p.15
• Color identified against a PANTONE swatch during field inquiry as approximately PANTONE 179U — reddish-orange analogous to a cooling welding bead, with more intense luminosity at each torus center than at the periphery.p.14
• A neighbor of the witness, described as retired from a redacted institution ('retraité de X'), recounted that in the 1970s a three-officer patrol in Roubaix had reported observing a UAP near the commune of Leers, a few kilometers from HEM.p.11

Verbatim

• Vers 21h +/- 5 minutes, mon attention a soudain été attirée par trois anneaux rougeâtres, parfaitement distingués comme s'ils venaient d'apparaitre dans le ciel légèrement sur ma gauche.

  p.2

• Le PAN disparait instantanément avant d'atteindre les toits de maisons, comme si les anneaux s'étaient éteints.

  p.2

• il soudainement disparu comme si les anneaux s'étaient éteints … c'est ce qui me m'interroge le plus.

  p.3

• Je suis bien incapable d'expliquer ce que j'ai vu. Je sais que cette chose était là clairement visible et ne pouvant être confondu avec des lanternes thaï ou une entrée atmosphérique.

  p.12

• De toute évidence, aucune hypothèse d'ordre météorologique, astronomique ou astronautique ne permet de rendre compte des caractéristiques du PAN.

  p.16

• Mes recherches ne m'ont pas permis de trouver un engin, drone ou autre objet pouvant correspondre.

  p.12

• Disons que mes certitudes ont été remplacées par des questions …

  p.12

Most interesting

• The witness, a self-described skeptic who had previously dismissed all UAP as natural phenomena or optical effects, took written notes immediately upon returning home — and later recovered contemporaneous notes from his electronic calendar that were consistent with every detail reported a year later.
• A neighbor the witness described as 'retraité de X' (redacted institution) was notably unsurprised by the account and cited a 1970s report from Roubaix in which a three-officer patrol declared observing a UAP near Leers, a few kilometers from HEM — a potential pattern of repeat phenomenon in the same geographic corridor.
• The witness also withheld from his initial QT a shooting star he observed seconds after the UAP, judging it an unrelated coincidence; investigators noted this as an example of selective self-editing that can affect testimony completeness.
• The toroidal (3-D elongated oval) character of the rings was confirmed not from investigator prompting but from a sketch the witness drew on an envelope immediately after the observation; the sketch was produced before any GEIPAN contact and remained consistent with field-reconstruction findings roughly two years later.
• Wind profiling via Earthnullschool showed the upper-level flow at ~1500 m was NNE at 26 km/h — directly opposing a northwest-to-southeast sky-lantern drift — making the lantern hypothesis untenable on purely physical grounds even before the shape argument.
• Applying the Thales theorem to all 16 hobby-drone models on a reference list, the maximum estimated witness distance for a single-object interpretation was 1.29 m, which is so close the witness would certainly have perceived the object's mechanical structure and noise — indicating either a substantially larger craft or a severely underestimated apparent size.
• The witness's phrasing 'Au cours de ma carrière dans X' on page 13 contains the same institutional redaction as his neighbor's description, raising the possibility both men had professional backgrounds in a sensitive public-sector field, though the document does not pursue this inference.