The Red Mass on the D23

It was about 17:00 on 12 November 1992. A woman was driving on the D23 in the Vosges, heading from Sapois towards Vagney. A big red mass appeared, blinking, and came at the car fast. It made no sound. It passed about 50 metres from the vehicle, and it frightened her. The whole encounter lasted only a few seconds.

What is on the record

That is almost everything GEIPAN has published about it. The case sits in the public archive of GEIPAN, the unit of the French space agency CNES that investigates reports of unidentified aerospace phenomena. The page holds one testimony and no documents. Its one-line summary reads "Observation d'une masse rouge passant très près d'un véhicule", a red mass passing very close to a vehicle. The fuller description adds only the time, the blinking, the silence and the distance. It closes: "Le phénomène n'a pas pu être identifié."

The witness form behind it adds a little. It records an ovoid red shape and a very cloudy or overcast sky. It also gives the local time as 19:55, where the description says about 17:00, and the page does not reconcile the two. Nothing says which way the mass was travelling. No hypothesis is named as weighed and set aside, so a reader cannot see which ordinary explanations were tested.

Class D is GEIPAN's category for a case it investigated and could not explain. It rates this one strange to very strange, with medium to strong consistency. The published summary is too brief to show what that rating rests on.

Why it sits where it does

The page grades L0 · SINGLE ACCOUNT. GEIPAN withholds its witnesses' identities, so the record carries no identified witness. A tier measures sourcing, not the quality of the investigation. What came at the car on the D23 is not resolved here.