GEIPAN Case 2015-01-09080 — SAINT-ZACHARIE (83) 12.01.2015

Brief

At 07:00 on 12 January 2015, a witness in a mobile home in Saint-Zacharie (83) stepped outside and found himself within approximately 3 meters of a silent, grey oval object roughly 7 meters long bearing a white forward light and a structured yellow-and-red flank marking. The object drifted north at walking pace, threading between two mobile homes without disturbing adjacent tree branches, then tilted, accelerated, and disappeared above the treeline. No radar trace was recovered, no additional witnesses were found, and a GEIPAN-appointed psychologist cleared the testimony of human-factor explanations including hypnopompic hallucination and lucid dreaming. The expert panel assigned consistency 0.75 and strangeness 0.70, issuing a final D1 classification.

Metadata

Agency

GEIPAN / CNES

Release

2007-03-22

Type

PDF • .pdf

Length

19 pages

Classification

UNCLASSIFIED

Programs

GEIPAN, GEPAN, SEPRA

Tags

oval UAP, silent propulsion, close encounter, white light, yellow-red marking, low altitude, Saint-Zacharie, Var, 2015, D1 unexplained, GEIPAN

Key points

• The UAP closed to within approximately 3 meters of the witness and passed through a 6-meter gap between two mobile homes without disturbing the branches of a shared tree — a maneuver the witness described as extraordinary piloting dexterity.p.2
• The object was completely silent at point-blank range: no hum, no propulsion sound, no airflow, and the same silence persisted when the craft tilted and accelerated at the end of the observation.p.10
• A yellow-and-red structured marking on the forward hull — compared by the witness to the Kronenbourg logo — produced a 'freezing' sensation and apparent time-loss; the investigator flagged this as the observation's most anomalous sub-event.p.2
• Meteorological data confirmed near-zero wind from the north at 07:00 — directionally opposite to the UAP's movement — partially weakening but not eliminating the advertising balloon hypothesis due to possible micro-valley effects.p.10
• No radar trace was found for the date and time, and no additional witnesses were located on the commune or in the immediate vicinity.p.10
• Advertising balloon probability assessed below 30%; dirigible below 5%; hypnopompic hallucination below 15%; lucid dream below 15% — no hypothesis reached a threshold of sufficient probability.p.16
• A GEIPAN forensic psychologist reviewed the audio-video interview recording and found no human-factor phenomena — including false memories — and rated the testimony as reliable, sincere, and credible.p.18
• The final expert-panel classification is D1 (unexplained), with a consistency score of 0.75 and a strangeness score of 0.70.p.19

Verbatim

• sort sur sa terrasse et se trouve alors face à un PAN qui remplit son champ de vision et « qui glisse » sans bruit tout en venant dans sa direction, pour se rapprocher à une distance estimée de 3 mètres.

  p.2

• C'est à cet instant que le témoin « se sent figé » et « perd la notion du temps ».

  p.2

• il confirme toute absence de bruit, de souffle, de tout mode de propulsion. Pour lui, il n'a pas vu de pilote à l'intérieur ou dessous, et « il n'y en avait pas ».

  p.4

• Notons au passage que pour lui ce serait « le seul élément humain » dans l'observation étrange qu'il est en train de faire puisque assimilable à un élément d'identification, une « marque de fabrique ».

  p.5

• Le témoin est formel sur ce point : absence totale de bruit, pas même un ronronnement, pas le moindre souffle.

  p.10

• Le GEIPAN conclut : cas inexpliqué D1.

  p.18

Most interesting

• The witness stepped outside in -3°C temperatures without a coat, not noticing the cold until the observation ended — a detail the investigator cited as evidence of genuine real-time absorption rather than confabulation.
• The witness considered alerting neighbors and retrieving a camera but chose continuous observation over documentation, a trade-off the report describes as a 'choix cornélien' (Cornelian dilemma).
• The yellow-and-red hull marking was the only feature the witness characterised as potentially human in origin — the sole legible cultural reference on an otherwise wholly unfamiliar object.
• GEIPAN opened the investigation on 20 January 2015, eight days after the event, but the expert-panel submission did not occur until 29 March 2017 — a gap of over two years between investigation and classification.
• The witness had no prior interest in UAP before the observation; the gendarmerie declined to take his deposition when he attempted to report it on the day of the event.
• The dirigible hypothesis received the lowest probability rating of all four alternatives — below 5% — primarily because no gondola or pilot was observed and because total silence at 3–5 meters is physically inexplicable for any known airship.
• GEIPAN's scoring framework separates consistency (quantity × reliability of information collected) from strangeness (distance from all known phenomena), treating them as independent axes; this case scores 0.75 and 0.70 respectively.