The Weaver's Shuttle over Volx

It was about 11pm on 8 August 2012, a clear night with barely a breeze. A witness was stretched out on the terrace of a parent's house at Volx watching the stars, with the dogs lying alongside. Something came into view in the north and crossed almost straight overhead towards the south. It had the shape of a "navette de tisserand", a weaver's shuttle, brown-green with fuzzy edges and a dark red round patch at its centre. It was very faint, yet it hid the stars as it passed, and the witness saw a kind of ripple in the sky around it. Its long axis lay across its line of travel. The witness yanked off an MP3 player to listen and heard nothing. The dogs did not stir. Five seconds later the trees hid it.

What is on the record

The source is GEIPAN's file, which holds the gendarmerie report (PV n°12943) and an investigation report dated December 2015. A local investigator went back to the terrace with the witness in January 2015 and reconstructed the sighting twice. The five seconds held. No aircraft or satellite was recorded at that hour, and the Moon and bright planets were down. A Météo-France expert recognised no weather phenomenon.

The report works through the geometry. An animal in flight would have to be below 20 metres and could not explain the colours. Between 20 and 500 metres it would have to be a powered craft, and the witness would have heard it. Above about 460 metres it would have been moving faster than sound, and no bang came. The investigator found no sign of a hoax, gave a helicopter a 10% weight and a hallucination 5%. The largest share, 50%, went to a rare natural atmospheric phenomenon that no one has yet identified. GEIPAN's formal conclusion is that the object "ne ressemble à aucun objet ou phénomène connu" (resembles no known object or phenomenon). It classes the case D1. Class D means GEIPAN investigated and could not explain it.

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 crossed the sky over Volx is not resolved here.