The Red Point over Évreux Air Base

A telephone call reached the duty officer at Base aérienne 105, the air base at Évreux, on the evening of Sunday 23 April 1978. From 20.35 universal time he watched a red point of light low in the west-north-west, ten to fifteen degrees above the horizon. Staff in the control tower saw it too as its light slowly faded. The officer asked the radar for help. At 20.44 it picked up an echo on the same bearing, 18 nautical miles out, moving off to the north-north-west at an estimated 30 to 40 knots. At 20.51 the light was gone and the radar was stopped.

What is on the record

The source is GEIPAN's own file, held under the name of Fauville, which the base carries in its full title of Évreux-Fauville. The officer wrote his report the next day. The radar report gives the 24th as the date of the sighting. GEIPAN reads that as a typing slip, which lets the sighting and the echo be taken as simultaneous. The file has no recording of the radar trace. The echo was very faint, 1 on a scale of 5, but it lasted seven minutes.

The original GEPAN inquiry rejected a helicopter and a balloon. Venus was bright that night and close to the same part of the sky, and GEIPAN finds it surprising that the officer never mentions it. The planet sat lower and further west than the light he described, so GEIPAN judges a mix-up extremely unlikely. It is more guarded about the radar. The second radar at Cinq-Mars-la-Pile did not confirm the echo, and a false return from a secondary reflection cannot be ruled out. GEIPAN classes the case D1: unexplained after investigation, moderately strange and distant, though the testimony is of good consistency.

Why it sits where it does

L4 · OFFICIAL RECORD. A released government record names who saw it: the duty officer and the control-tower staff of Base aérienne 105 at Évreux, identified by post rather than by name. No independent testimony sits beside that record, and GEIPAN notes that only one statement was taken. The tier measures sourcing, not the investigation's verdict. What the officer watched is not resolved here.