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Case of Staffelfelden, on April 22, 1966:

Case number:

ALSACAT-1966-04-22-STAFFELFELDEN-1

Summary:

The regional newspaper L'Alsace of April 26, 1966, had reported a sighting of a "strange celestial phenomenon seen in the sky of Ensisheim".

Two days later the same newspaper indicated that they had received other testimonies for this phenomenon of April 22, 1966, including the one that follows.

A gentleman of Staffelfelden, Mr. H. K., wrote to the newspaper to report that the same Friday evening April 22, 1966, at 09:10 p.m., located on the secondary pane of the Marie-Louise mine with several of his comrades, he saw a kind of disk slightly superior in its dimensions to the moon, and a wave of haloed brightness. The phenomenon was in the clear and starry sky of the southern hemisphere, or about 7:30 in the North-South axis. Gradually, it evolved, took shape at its center a darker hue. He could not decide whether it was moving or stationary, but at times it seemed to expand. The phenomenon is then weakened and disappeared. It was seen by many employees, miners and workers of the Maria Louisa mine.

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Sources:

[Ref. lae2:] NEWSPAPER "L'ALSACE":

[Ref. cvn2:] CHRISTIAN VALENTIN:

Former journalist Christian Valentin published in 2012 a very interesting book telling the story of UFO sightings, flying saucers sightings, in Alsace, from the beginning to 1980.

In this book, he reports that L'Alsace for April 26, 1966, had reported on the sighting in Ensisheim on April 22, 1966, and he adds the article in the same newspaper 2 days later:

Discussion:

About Christian Valentin's book:

It is not at all my habit to "advertise" a book or anything, and I have no interested relationship with the author, but I wanted to say a word on the book by Christian Valentin, "Mythes et Réalités des Phénomènes Aériens Non Identifiés" (i.e. "Myths and Realities of Unidentified Aerial Phenomena" (cover on the left) , ref. [cv2]; which, as its subtitle indicates, is about Alsatian UFO sighting reports and the saucer lore in Alsace.

I think Alsatian ufologists and, generally, people interested in the UFO question, or in the history of Alsace, my region, would probably like this book.

The 144 pages book is sober but well presented, unbiased, richly documented and illustrated. It is the first work in print specifically about UFO sightings in Alsace. (There was another one a few years ago, but it was partly made by copying - pasting without mention of the sources, portions of my website, especially the Alsatians cases I almost exhaustively documented in my catalog of UFO sightings in France in 1954, and copies from another websites; the trivial explanations I proposed or gave there being almost always stripped off!)

The author does not want to prove or disprove the possibility of extraterrestrial visitors or some other so-called "extraordinary" explanation, he rather offers a chronologically ordered review of Alsatian UFO reports, starting from the origin and stopping in 1980, based on known sources ufology, on the articles of the regional Press, and cases less known or even unreleased so far that he collected directly with the witnesses. His own comments are printed in a different color, references to the sources are always given. A very nice work in my opinion!

The author currently has a blog where he shows what libraries in Alsace have the book available, see: christian.valentin.overblog.com

Such an event had to be "transnational", not only seen in Alsace.

And indeed we have other comments on that date and time.

On April 22, 1966, four sightings were reported in Germany according to the "UFO-Datenbank" catalog:

Note that for the last sighting, the explanation is given, but the reconciliation with the other sightings, although obvious, was not done.

In the old UFOCAT catalog, we have, among the observations of April 22, 1966:

And so, without Christian Valentin, these sightings would have remained independently unexplained:

And, without ALSACAT, all these and the other, transnational, sightings, would have remained unrelated and unidentified, except for the one correctly explaned in UFO-Datenbank.

About the rocket, and clouds of barium:

The literature (*) shows that on April 22, 1966, France performed, from Hammaguir near Colomb-Bechar in Algeria, its third launch of the sounding rocket Ruby. Ruby 03, to "vaporize" barium copper oxide in the upper atmosphere to study the high-energy particles sent by the sun and the solar wind. Barium clouds also allows observer on the ground to distinguish the direction of the magnetic forces lines in Earth's magnetic field.

This launch of the Ruby 03 sounding rocket established a French rocket high altitude record of 2035 km.

VE-210 "Ruby" was designed to test the airborne release of the cap, the separation and rotation of the third stage of the "Diamond" launcher. It carried the top of the Diamant launcher onto a VE-110 Agate first stage.

(*) For example, "History of the French Sounding Rocket Programmes", by Christopher Rothmund, March 1991.

Below: some images of barium clouds:

Evaluation:

Barium cloud spread by rocket.

Sources references:

* = Source is available to me.
? = Source I am told about but could not get so far. Help needed.

• [lae2] * "A propos du phénomène céleste: De nouveaux témoignages", article in the regional newspaper L'Alsace, April 28, 1966.
• [cvn2] * "Mythes et Réalités des Phénomènes Aériens Non Identifiés - Histoire des soucoupes volantes en Alsace jusqu'en 1980", book by Christian Valentin, Grimoires d'Alsace publishers, France, page 88, 2012.

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