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

Brief

At 07:00 on Monday, 12 January 2015, a witness at a private residence in Saint-Zacharie (Var department, southern France) noticed a diffuse light through a glass door, stepped onto their terrace, and found themselves within meters of an anthracite-grey oval mass moving silently in their direction at low speed. A non-blinding white light was mounted at the object's leading edge. GEIPAN — CNES's official UAP investigation unit and successor to GEPAN and SEPRA — classified the case D1: an unexplained phenomenon of medium strangeness. The case file includes gendarmerie procès-verbaux and technical notes.

Metadata

Agency

GEIPAN / CNES

Release

2007-03-22

Type

PDF • .pdf

Length

14 pages

Classification

UNCLASSIFIED (GEIPAN D1 — unexplained, medium strangeness)

Programs

GEIPAN, GEPAN, SEPRA

Tags

oval, anthracite grey, white forward light, silent, slow-moving, close encounter, dawn observation, France, 2015, GEIPAN D1

Key points

• GEIPAN assigned classification D1, denoting an unexplained phenomenon with medium strangeness — the second-highest unexplained tier in the agency's taxonomy.
• The observation occurred at 07:00 local time, at close range — estimated within a few meters — giving the witness an unusually detailed view of the object's shape and lighting.
• The UAP was described as an oval mass, anthracite grey, with a non-blinding white light at its forward aspect, moving slowly and producing no audible sound.
• Supporting documentation includes gendarmerie procès-verbaux, indicating French law-enforcement involvement in the initial collection of witness testimony.
• The case was investigated under the GEIPAN program (Groupe d'Études et d'Informations sur les Phénomènes Aérospatiaux Non-identifiés), the CNES unit that succeeded GEPAN and SEPRA.
• The listed release date of 2007-03-22 predates the 2015 incident by nearly eight years, suggesting the date field reflects the GEIPAN public database launch rather than case-specific declassification.

Most interesting

• GEIPAN's D1 classification means investigators examined the evidence and could not explain the observation, but assessed it at 'medium' rather than 'high' strangeness — placing it in a formally unresolved category maintained by a national space agency.
• Saint-Zacharie is a small commune in the Var department (83) in Provence; the 83 postal code embedded in the case ID encodes the department, a standard GEIPAN filing convention.
• The gendarmerie's procès-verbal is a formal sworn statement with legal weight in France, distinct from a simple police report — its inclusion signals the case passed a threshold of official seriousness.
• GEIPAN is the only government UAP unit operated by a national space agency (CNES) rather than a defense or intelligence body, and it publishes case files publicly under a transparency mandate dating to 2007.
• The silent, slow, low-altitude close approach over a private terrace at dawn fits a recurring pattern in GEIPAN's D-class archive, where proximity and absence of sound are the two features most resistant to conventional explanation.