The Fire-Coloured Ball over Cazères-sur-l'Adour

At around ten in the evening on 1 November 2002 a witness at Cazères-sur-l'Adour saw a ball the colour of fire. It carried several flashing lights. The ball went back and forth several times and then, after about thirty seconds, it was gone. That is the whole of the account as GEIPAN publishes it.

What is on the record

GEIPAN is the unit of the French space agency CNES that investigates unidentified aerial phenomena. It holds this case as CAZERES-SUR-L'ADOUR (40) 01.11.2002 and classes it D. Class D means GEIPAN investigated and could not explain what was seen. Its page rates the phenomenon strange to very strange, of medium to strong consistency. It was last updated in March 2007.

The file is very thin. The page lists no documents, no investigation report and no hypotheses that were tested and set aside. Its one intriguing line is that "cette observation semble également avoir été faite par des pilotes" (this observation seems also to have been made by pilots). GEIPAN does not say who those pilots were, where they were flying or how their report reached the case. No second testimony appears on the page. The flashing lights and the back-and-forth motion are the only details, and nothing in the record shows how they were weighed against aircraft or anything else.

Why it sits where it does

L0 · SINGLE ACCOUNT. GEIPAN withholds the identities of its witnesses, so the released record carries no identified witness. The pilots are mentioned but not identified, and their account is not in the file. The tier measures sourcing, not the quality of GEIPAN's work, and on this case the public file shows little of that work. What moved over Cazères-sur-l'Adour is not resolved here.