Classification: MA-1 n1The classification scheme (e.g. MA-1) was presented in a previous paper by Vallee.
On Thursday, July 1, 1965, two French submarines, the Junon and the Daphné, escorted by the logistic support vessel Rhône, left the Toulon navy base in the Mediterranean and sailed toward Gibraltar. The ships traveled first to La Horta in the Azores, then to Norfolk, Virginia, to conduct a series of joint operations with the U.S. Navy, which was engaged at the time in the recovery of a Gemini capsule near Bermuda; the French submarines escorted the aircraft carrier Wasp. Later the ships went through Hurricane Betsy, whose effects they avoided by diving to three hundred meters. On the way back to France they stopped for ten days at Pointe-à-Pitre, Guadeloupe, and for one day at Saintes before reaching the island of Martinique, where they anchored in late September 1965.
It was during their layover in Fort-de-France one evening, by a dark sky and clear weather, that a large luminous object arrived slowly and silently from the west, flew to the south, made three complete loops in the sky over the French vessels, and vanished like a rapidly extinguished light bulb (Vallee, 1990).
The person who reported this case to us, Mr. Michel Figuet, was at the time first timonier (helmsman) of the French fleet of the Mediterranean. He observed the arrival of the object from his position on the deck of the submarine Junon. He had time to go up to the conning tower, where he took six pairs of binoculars and distributed them to his companions. There were three hundred witnesses, including four officers on the Junon, three officers on the Daphné, a dozen French sailors, and personnel of the weather observatory.
All witnesses aboard the Junon saw the object as a large ball of light or a disk on edge arriving from the west at 21:15. It was the color of a fluorescent tube, about the same luminosity as the full moon. It moved slowly, horizontally, at a distance estimated at ten kilometers south of the ships, from west to east. It left a whitish trace similar to the glow of a television screen.
When it was directly south of the ships the object dropped toward the earth, made two complete loops, then hovered in
the midst of a faint halo
(Figure 3).
Mr. Figuet told the author that he observed the last part of this trajectory through
binoculars; he was able to see two red spots under the disk. Shortly thereafter, the object vanished in the center of
its glow like a bulb turned off.
The trail and the halo remained visible in the sky for a full minute. At 9:45
p.m. the halo reappeared at the same place, and the object seemed to emerge as if switched on. It rose, made two more
loops and flew away to the west, where it disappeared at 21:50. The next day Mr. Figuet compared notes with a
communications engineer who had observed the same object from the Navy fort. Together, they called the weather
observatory at Fort-de-France. The man who answered the call had also observed the object. He stated that it was
neither an aircraft, nor a rocket.
In 1988 the author was able to interview Michel Figuet in Brussels. He confirmed the maneuvers and the appearance of the object and stated that he had met again with some of the crew members whose recollections of the facts were equally precise. A landscape illuminated by the full moon receives 0.318 lux, or 1.8 × 10-3 W/m2. Since there is agreement among the observers that the object had approximately the same brightness as the full moon and was situated about 10 kilometers away, we can compute its total luminosity as:
P = I × A
where I is the intensity in W/m2 and A is the area over which light is spread n2The author wishes to thank David A. Newton for bringing to his attention some important corrections and improvements to his initial calculations in this case and those that follow. (Private communication, August 8, 1993)..
Here,
P = 1.8 × 10-3 × 4π r2
where r=10,000 m, which gives P=2.3 X 106 W (2.3 megawatts).