The Circourt Lights and the Double Bang

The sky was clear at about 17:42 on 14 November 1979. A French Air Force officer on leave was driving with a passenger in the area of Circourt, in the Vosges. Two point-like lights appeared, red-orange and set close together. They settled at a height of about 100 metres above the woods and went out one after the other. No sound was heard. Thirty seconds later came a double "bang", the two reports almost simultaneous. A minute after that two more lights appeared at the same height and distance but further north. Five seconds later they too went out one by one.

What is on the record

The case is in the public archive of GEIPAN, the unit of the French space agency CNES that investigates reports of unidentified aerospace phenomena. Its file holds a single testimony. The local press, GEIPAN notes, reported that several people in the area had also seen the lights. None of them reached the file. "Aucun autre témoignage ou précision ne seront recueillis par la gendarmerie" (the gendarmerie collected no other testimony or detail), and the phenomenon "reste inexpliqué".

The officer offered the ordinary reading himself. He thought the bang was probably a patrol breaking the sound barrier at high altitude. GEIPAN records that view but does not test it against the lights, and its summary names no other hypothesis it weighed and set aside. The passenger has no testimony of her own in the file.

Class D is GEIPAN's category for a case it investigated and could not explain. It rates this one strange to very strange, with medium to strong consistency.

Why it sits where it does

The page grades L0 · SINGLE ACCOUNT. GEIPAN withholds its witnesses' identities, so the record describes an officer but never names him and carries no identified witness. The press accounts of other sightings are not in the file. A tier measures sourcing, not the quality of the investigation. What hung over the woods at Circourt is not resolved here.