The Motorcyclist's Cylinder at La Fare-les-Oliviers

At about seven in the evening on 24 June 2001 a man at La Fare-les-Oliviers, north-west of Aix-en-Provence, saw a cylindrical object standing upright in the sky and moving slowly. He followed it on his motorbike to keep it in view and filmed it as he went. He put its height at about 600 metres. To him it looked 15 metres tall and 2.5 metres across. It was the colour of aluminium with bright points on it like headlamps. It crept along at roughly 10 kilometres an hour.

What is on the record

GEIPAN is the unit of the French space agency CNES that investigates unidentified aerial phenomena. Its file here is one paragraph and one witness questionnaire. The summary line reads "Observation d'un objet cylindrique brillant se déplaçant lentement" (a bright cylindrical object moving slowly).

The questionnaire gives the witness as a man of 40. It times the sighting between 19:00 and 19:30 in clear weather and gives the direction he was watching as 315 degrees, roughly north-west. The distance is marked "variable", which fits a witness on the move. It also notes that the witness, not the object, ended the sighting.

The film is the striking part of the file, and also the missing part. GEIPAN says he filmed the object. Yet its page shows no footage, no still and no analysis of what the camera caught. It publishes no investigation report either and names no explanation it tested and set aside. Its conclusion is one line: "L'enquête n'a pas permis d'identifier cette observation" (the investigation could not identify this sighting). The case sits in class D, which means GEIPAN investigated and could not explain it.

Why it sits where it does

The page grades L0 · SINGLE ACCOUNT. GEIPAN withholds the identities of its witnesses, so the record carries no identified witness, and the film it mentions is not published with the case. A tier measures sourcing, not the quality of GEIPAN's investigation. What the motorcyclist followed over La Fare-les-Oliviers is not resolved here.