The Doullens Radar-Station Light

Under an unbroken ceiling of low cloud, at 1.34am on Tuesday 19 October 1954, the sentry on duty outside a radar station at Doullens saw a green light come out of the cloud over a farm towards Mondicourt. In half a second it crossed a wide sweep of sky to the east, silent, turning from green to orange to a dull red. Then it stopped dead over La Bellevue, high up at about sixty degrees.

It held there for two or three minutes, long enough for the sentry to alert superiors. A sergeant saw a disc from below, tilted like an ellipse, its light changing every five seconds or so from a "blafarde verte" (a wan green) to orange and then yellow. A private saw a greenish tinge behind the colours and had it moving up and down as well as sideways. Then it raced back the way it had come and vanished into the cloud. It reappeared for a few seconds by the sergeant's account, or two minutes by the private's.

What is on the record

GEIPAN's file is the source. Its summary lists a private, a caporal-chef and a sergeant among several soldiers at the station. The radar itself was not running that night. The 1954 military paperwork in the file shows the soldiers' written reports on a "mysterieux objet céleste" travelling up the chain to the Air Ministry's scientific bureau that winter. The names are blacked out.

GEIPAN tested three explanations. The Moon sat in the east beside a bright Jupiter, near where the men were looking, but they never mention it, and the colours and movement are hard to square with it. An aircraft does not stop for minutes at a constant size. A helicopter's red and green lights could explain the colours but not the speed. If the cloud-based height estimate holds, the light was about a kilometre away and 15 to 20 metres across. GEIPAN calls the case "bien étrange quoique lointain" (very strange, if distant) and files it as class D, unidentified after investigation.

Why it sits where it does

The page grades L4 · OFFICIAL RECORD. A released government record names who saw it: soldiers of the Doullens radar station, identified by rank if not by name. No independent testimony sits beside that record in the archive. A tier measures sourcing, not the quality of the investigation. What the soldiers watched under the cloud is not resolved here.