The Le Verdon Light

The S/S Le Verdon lay at anchor in the roadstead of Port-Gentil in the early hours of 1 June 1952. Her lights were out except for the anchor lights. At 2.40am the second captain was at his station on the bow when he saw an object coming from inland. It stopped, veered to the right and took up its original course again. It did this twice. The second turn came directly above the ship. He telephoned the commander on the bridge, who picked the light up in a pair of Zeiss night binoculars. It was "une lueur circulaire de couleur orange extrêmement lumineuse" (a circular orange glow, extremely bright), moving very fast in a nearly straight line. He followed it for about three minutes until he lost it. He heard nothing.

What is on the record

GEIPAN is the unit of the French space agency CNES that investigates unidentified aerospace phenomena. Its file holds a three-page naval document. The Marine nationale staff in Dakar sent a copy of the commander's report to the Secretary of State for the Navy on 20 June 1952. The report itself was written aboard at Libreville on 2 June. It gives the sky as clear and starry to the north with a first-quarter moon. The commander put the light at three or four thousand metres and its apparent size at that of a planet. Twenty years at sea, six of them in wartime, allowed him to affirm that it was neither a shooting star nor an aircraft of any usual type. A sketch on the back of one page is by an unknown hand.

GEIPAN records that the hypotheses of a meteor and of a missile firing were raised "mais non consolidées" (but not borne out). No other testimony was collected. It keeps the case in class D, which means it investigated and could not explain it.

Why it sits where it does

This case grades L4, an official record. A released government record names who saw it: the commander and second captain of the S/S Le Verdon, a ship of the Compagnie des Transports Océaniques. Their personal names are blacked out, and no independent testimony sits beside that record. The tier measures sourcing, never truth. What turned above the Le Verdon is not resolved here.