The Light That Turned Red at Ormoy-la-Rivière

At about a quarter to eleven at night a woman watched a luminous object moving around the sky above Ormoy-la-Rivière, just south of Étampes. It passed into a cloud. There it gave off a burst of light, then climbed quickly and took on a red colour. In the end she could see only a red point, and then that disappeared too.

What is on the record

GEIPAN is the unit of the French space agency CNES that investigates unidentified aerial phenomena. Its file on this case is one paragraph and one witness questionnaire. The questionnaire gives her age as 40 and describes a single cylindrical object, red, with a trail or tail. She judged it the size of a half moon and fast, on a rising path. The sky was cloudy with a few clear spells and the noise is marked as unknown. GEIPAN's summary line calls it an object "avec des changements de direction" (with changes of direction). It adds that no other testimony was gathered.

The dating is untidy inside GEIPAN's own record. The case and the questionnaire are both dated 29 December 1978, but the description places the sighting on 26 December. GEIPAN publishes no investigation report and names no explanation that it tested and set aside. It files the case in class D, which means it investigated and could not explain it. Our copy of GEIPAN's database lists the case under Étampes. GEIPAN's page now names Ormoy-la-Rivière, the next commune south, and this page follows GEIPAN.

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 here there is only one witness to begin with. A tier measures sourcing, not the quality of GEIPAN's investigation. What climbed into the sky over Ormoy-la-Rivière is not resolved here.