The Lille Garden Spheres

At about 11pm on 6 June 1997 a witness in a garden in Lille noticed a luminous ball hanging still in the sky. It looked roughly a quarter the size of the Moon. After a few minutes a second ball arrived at very high speed and stopped beside the first. Then the pair set off together at high speed towards the north. The witness had called a friend, who came in time to see the two balls leave.

What is on the record

GEIPAN, the unit of the French space agency CNES that investigates unidentified aerial phenomena, holds the case as LILLE (59) 06.06.1997. It classes it D. Class D means GEIPAN looked into it and could not explain it. The page rates the case strange to very strange with medium to strong consistency.

The description is four sentences long, and its last one is hedged. The gendarmerie "a semble t-il reçu d'autres appels" (seems to have received other calls) about a phenomenon that "n'a pas été expliqué" (has not been explained). The page does not say how many calls there were, what they described or whether anyone followed them up.

The file holds two testimony sheets and no documents. The first records a man of 50 and codes two white spheres, fast and silent, under a fair sky. GEIPAN names no explanation it tested or rejected. The page gives no direction of arrival and no length for the whole sighting. Nor does it say whether air traffic over the city that night was checked.

Why it sits where it does

L0 · SINGLE ACCOUNT. GEIPAN withholds the identities of its witnesses, so the released record carries no identified witness even though two people saw the lights. The tier measures sourcing, not the quality of the investigation. What the two watched leave over Lille is not resolved here.