Air France Flight 3532

At 13.14 on 28 January 1994 an Air France Airbus A320 flying Nice to London was over Coulommiers in Seine-et-Marne. The chief steward was in the cockpit at the time and pointed out something off to the left that he took for a weather balloon. The captain, Jean-Charles Duboc, and the co-pilot described something else: a brown or dark red disc that changed shape and then disappeared all at once. Reims air traffic control told them it had no traffic in the sector.

What is on the record

The archive now holds the official file. GEIPAN, the unit of the French space agency CNES that investigates such reports, records that at the same moment the military radar at Cinq-Mars-la-Pile logged an unidentified track for fifty seconds. It crossed the path of flight AF3532 and matched no filed flight plan. It left the screens as the object left the crew's view. GEIPAN is careful about that link. Its investigators "resteront prudents" (stayed cautious) over whether the radar return and the sighting were the same thing, though they note an aircraft would have left a matching return.

The file is frank about the case's weaknesses. The crew reported it officially only three years later, to the gendarmerie and to SEPRA, when the case was already in the press. The steward never gave a statement. In 2012 GEIPAN asked Météo-France to test the balloon hypothesis: a sounding balloon had crossed the aircraft's route, but an hour earlier, and by the time of the sighting it would have burst and been falling far to the south-east. GEIPAN kept two hypotheses open that it could not firm up, an unknown optical effect or a loose envelope drifting on the wind. It classes the case D1, unexplained, of middling consistency and marked strangeness.

The archive's one video telling adds that the object seemed to turn transparent and places it near Taverny, a French air command site. Neither detail is in GEIPAN's file.

Why it sits where it does

L4 · DOC-CORROBORATED. The telling resolves three crew members, the captain by name, and a primary government record now stands behind that testimony: GEIPAN's investigation file. The archive's roster lists the steward as "Stewart", a misreading of the French chef stewart. The grade measures sourcing, not what the object was. GEIPAN itself calls the radar link uncertain and the testimony late. What crossed Flight 3532's path is not resolved here.