The Angoulême Brown Ovoid

It was a quarter past one in the afternoon on 15 August 2009. A witness in the garden of a house at Angoulême, in the Charente, saw an egg-shaped form cross the sky on a dead-straight path. It was a matt brown colour. It travelled from east to west in the direction of Cognac, and no sound was heard at any point. Nobody else reported it.

What is on the record

The archive holds the case file of GEIPAN, the unit of the French space agency CNES that investigates UAP reports. It holds one statement and no published documents. What sets this file apart is how openly GEIPAN works through the options.

The witness ruled out an aeroplane or a helicopter. GEIPAN could not check that with air traffic control, because the gendarmerie report reached it too late. It then tried objects thrown or flown close to the ground: a rugby ball, a clay pigeon, a frisbee, a model aircraft. None fitted, since the thing passed well above the rooftops. It also considered a meteor entering the atmosphere. GEIPAN notes that the date fell at the peak of the Perseids, a time of strong meteor activity. With no second witness that could not be checked.

GEIPAN closes "en l'absence d'hypothèse consolidée" (for want of a firm hypothesis). Class D is its category for a phenomenon it investigated and could not explain. It rates this case strange to very strange.

Why it sits where it does

The page grades L0 · SINGLE ACCOUNT. GEIPAN withholds witness identities and the record speaks only of "un témoin", so it carries no identified witness. No one else saw the object and no other source sits beside the file. The tier measures sourcing, not the quality of GEIPAN's reasoning, and it is never a verdict. What crossed the sky over Angoulême that afternoon is not resolved here.