The Cylinder over the Boscherville Marshes

At about five to seven on the evening of 12 January 1989 a driver was passing the marshes at Saint-Martin-de-Boscherville, in the Seine valley west of Rouen. Around 30 metres above the marsh stood a cylindrical form that GEIPAN's summary calls "énorme" (enormous). On top sat a dome giving off a yellow light. Around its base ran a series of glowing portholes, red and white. As the car went by, the object went dark. A few seconds later it lit up again much higher in the sky. The whole sighting lasted only a few seconds.

What is on the record

GEIPAN is the unit of the French space agency CNES that investigates unidentified aerospace phenomena. Its file here is a short description and a single statement sheet, with no report or document attached. The sheet logs a clear night and a silent object roughly 100 metres away. The witness compared its size to a combine harvester, "moissonneuse", and the sheet notes one object seen twice in two different ways.

The file has one inconsistency. The description says a woman was at the wheel, while the statement sheet codes the witness as a man. Nothing else in the record settles which is right.

GEIPAN's closing line is brief. Its inquiries turned up no further information and could not identify the phenomenon. It lists no ordinary explanation that it weighed and set aside. The case stays in class D, which means it investigated and could not explain it.

Why it sits where it does

The page grades L0, a single account. GEIPAN withholds witness identities, so the record carries no identified witness. The tier measures sourcing, not the quality of the inquiry. The record holds one short sighting of a lit cylinder that vanished and returned higher up, logged by the state body that looked into it. What rose over the Boscherville marshes is not resolved here.