According to the Centre des Etudes des OVNIs Francais (CEOF) the triangular UFO was seen in thirty communities around Sedan. Over Charlesville & Meriere, 12 KM north of Sedan, witnesses reported the craft descending from a very high altitude. Later that night in Carignan, 22 KM south-east of Sedan, the UFO was seen aswell. This time by not less than 150 witnesses!

A.U.R.A. has heard from several sources, a.o. the french newspaper 'Le Courrier' that the UFO was video-taped by two young video-amateurs. The short sequence they shot of the object was aired on the news nation-wide on August 13th, 1998 by the frech channels FR 3 and Atenne 2. The pictures you see on this page are actual stills from the video made of the strange triangular craft over the Ardennes.

SPHERICAL UFO HOVERS OVER FRENCH BACKYARD

On Sunday afternoon, September 6, 1998, a family of four living in Voreppe, a town near Grenoble in the French Alps, received the shock of their lives. Looking up, the unidentified husband and wife, their three-year-old child and the grandmother spotted "a slow, hovering, seemingly metallic shiny sphere about two meters (6.6 feet) above the top of a cherry tree."

As the UFO hovered and hummed, the man ran indoors to fetch his camcorder. When he rushed back outside, he switched it on and "shot two minutes of videotape, showing the departure of the object." The family then telephoned the Gendarmerie (French police--J.T.) The officers took the videotape, contacted SEPRA, the French government agency devoted to UFO research, and reportedly advised the witnesses "not to speak to any ufologists about the incident." Two investigators from the SEPRA office in Toulouse spent two days investigating the encounter scene. They took burned branches from the cherry tree for lab analysis. In a brief statement, SEPRA said the videotape was "very interesting" and "useable" in terms of further UFO research.

The case was also investigated by the Rhone-Alpes delegation of SOS OVNI, the French ufological study group, which is based in Lyon. On Friday, September 11, 1998, representatives of the Centre Nacional des Etudes Spaciaux (CNES) saw the videotape and also interviewed the four eyewitnesses. Jean-Jacques Velasco of CNES said the UFO "looks as if it is floating and then moves away in a curious way." He described the object as "a round disc, about 5 meters (16.5 feet) across with a few protuberances coming out of it and a red ring around its bottom." Voreppe is in the department of Isere about 400 kilometers (240 miles) southeast of Paris.

(Source: UFO Round Up)

There is new information on the case of Voreppe which confirm, apparently, that it was a balloon. This is the case, revealed last week on Friday, September 11, of the observation of a supposed UFO in a garden of the small city of Voreppe, near Grenoble in the Alps, which was made on Sunday, September 6, around 8 pm. This case was widely reported (see, for instance, UFO ROUNDUP of September 14, page 1). It looked very promising, with a video recording, and with allegedly burned leaves of a tree taken for analysis by two specialists of CNES/SEPRA (Centre national d'Etudes Spatiales/ Service d'Expertise des Phénomènes de Rentrées Atmosphériques). However, on Saturday morning, September 12, the CNES put an abrupt end to the story by revealing that it had just been a misperception (not a hoax) of a child's balloon. This information has been confirmed to me, convincigly, by Jean-Jacques Velasco, the head of SEPRA. What happened is a family of Voreppe informed the police that their son had dropped a balloon which was fairly large (nearly one meter) and in the shape of a ladybug. There was very little wind, Velasco explained to me, and it drifted, first loosing altitude, hovered for a moment above the garden, and drifted away. The night was falling and the witnesses were mistaken about its size. When they shot the video, the balloon was already at some distance and hard to identify. This information has been confirmed to me confidentially, from another source according to which a string could be seen on the video, floatting under the balloon, and a woman's voice could be heard saying "It looks like a ladybug" (coccinelle in French) ! Still, it is curious that it took nearly a week to realize such a mistake!

CASE CLOSED!

Many thanks to Errol Bruce Knapp and UFO Updates Toronto