The Sainte-Soline Red Mushroom

It was about half past three on the morning of 16 August 1980 at Sainte-Soline, in the Deux-Sèvres. A witness was on the way home from a "bal populaire", a village dance. Above a field the witness saw an object shaped like the cap of a mushroom. It measured some 15 metres across by the witness's estimate and gave off a red light that GEIPAN calls "assez violente" (quite harsh). The witness went closer, to within roughly 400 metres. Then fear took over and the witness ran. On the way home the object was still in view. It passed over the village, still shining red and making no sound at all.

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. It holds one statement. No gendarmerie report, sketch or photograph is published with the online case. No mark was found on the ground or on the vegetation. GEIPAN's closing line is brief: "Aucune explication n'a été trouvée à cette observation" (no explanation was found for this sighting).

The online file does not list the ordinary explanations that were weighed, so a reader cannot see how aircraft, balloons or other lights were ruled out. The hour and the dance are both in GEIPAN's account. The file makes no comment on them and neither do we.

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 and the record refers only to "un témoin", so it carries no identified witness. No second person saw the object and no other source sits beside the file. The tier measures sourcing, not the quality of the investigation, and it is never a verdict. What glowed red over Sainte-Soline that night is not resolved here.