The Hunter's Cylinder at Saint-Geoirs

It was about ten past seven on the morning of 25 November 1976. A farmer out hunting near Saint-Geoirs saw a red glow in the distance for a few seconds and took it for a chimney fire. Then a twinkling light came towards him, travelling east to west. Ten or fifteen metres from him it changed direction, and he saw that it was an elongated object about two metres long. The cylinder hung still ten metres above the ground while an intermittent red glow ran all around it. It then moved off south without a sound, stopped, moved again and was lost behind the landscape. He put the close sighting at eight to ten seconds.

What is on the record

GEIPAN is the unit of the French space agency CNES that investigates unidentified aerial phenomena. It holds this case as SAINT-GEOIRS (38) 25.11.1976 and classes it D1. Class D means GEIPAN investigated and could not explain what was seen. The case predates GEPAN, the body GEIPAN grew out of. The gendarmerie investigated it and found no other witness and no trace along the path he described.

A GEIPAN note from 2011 reviews the file. It records that the witness was well regarded locally and hunted the area often, though his eyesight was reduced. The morning was slightly misty. The spot lay 5.72 kilometres from the Grenoble-Saint-Geoirs aerodrome, and he had heard a scheduled flight leave that morning. The first glimpse could have been the rising sun catching an aircraft. At ten metres only a helicopter could fit the hovering and the pulsing red light. Yet he heard nothing, his drawing shows a cylinder, and the gendarmes could not confirm any helicopter in the area. The note concludes that the object resembles neither aeroplane nor helicopter, "ni à rien de connu" (nor anything known). Oddly, the note's own title reads SAINT-ETIENNE DE GEOIRS, pointing to the neighbouring commune of Saint-Étienne-de-Saint-Geoirs.

Why it sits where it does

L0 · SINGLE ACCOUNT. GEIPAN withholds the identities of its witnesses, so the released record carries no identified witness. GEIPAN itself rates the case low in consistency because one man saw it, and high in strangeness because he saw it close. The tier measures sourcing, not the care of the investigation. What hung over the field is not resolved here.