The Metz Red-Smoke Triangle

At about ten to five on the afternoon of 3 December 1979, two witnesses at Metz saw a triangular object giving off two trails of red smoke. As it passed over a "tour hertzienne", a radio-relay tower, it stopped for a few seconds and then set off again. They followed it with their eyes until they lost sight of it. The red smoke stayed visible to the very end. At the same moment a third witness saw a very bright point of light.

What is on the record

The archive holds the case file of GEIPAN, the unit of the French space agency CNES that investigates UAP reports. GEIPAN logs three statements, one from each witness. No report, sketch or photograph is published with the online case. The file does not say where in Metz the witnesses stood or which tower the object crossed.

The investigation checked for air traffic that might match and found none. GEIPAN also could not tie the third witness's bright point to the triangle. In its words it was "sans qu'il soit possible de faire une corrélation entre les deux observations" (with no way to correlate the two sightings). So the case rests on two people who saw the same thing, with a third account that may or may not belong to it.

One piece of context comes from the calendar, not the file. At Metz in early December the sun sets a little after half past four, so the sighting fell in the first minutes of dusk. High objects can still catch the sun at that hour and glow red or orange against a darker sky. The published file does not say whether that was considered.

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

Why it sits where it does

The page grades L0 · SINGLE ACCOUNT. GEIPAN withholds witness identities, so none of the three people in the record is identified, and the archive holds no other source. The tier measures sourcing, not the quality of the investigation, and it is never a verdict. What trailed red smoke over Metz that afternoon is not resolved here.