The article below was published in the daily newspaper Le Midi Libre, France, le 28 janvier 1979.
Six pupils of the C.E.S. Condorcet of Nîmes observed on Tuesday, January 23 around 3:00 p.m., a discoidal object that crossed the sky from north to south in about thirty seconds.
Metallic gray in color, it looked like, one of the witnesses said, two plates glued together.
The trajectory was horizontal but the object seemed to roll on itself, fall on its edge, recover, then fall again, while continuing its journey.
Satellite disintegrating? Flying saucer?
"The hypothesis of a satellite that would have disintegrated does not hold, explained the president of the Véronica group. Indeed, the satellites disintegrate at very high altitude and that day, the sky was covered with medium clouds around three thousand meters. The wind was light, 2 to 4 m/s. If the witnesses had seen the fallout of the debris from the weather balloon released at Courbessac at 1 p.m., they would not have observed a horizontal trajectory, unless the wind had blown in a storm."
The dimensions of the machine seemed large. One of the young witnesses, a member of Véronica, had the presence of mind to measure the angle under which it was seen: one degree thirty minutes, which would correspond to a craft of twenty-five meters in diameter observed at a thousand meters.
Taking into account these imposing dimensions and the good conditions of visibility which reigned, one can think that Danièle Vidal, Nicole N., Ariane S., Emilia S., Angèle P. and Jeanine N., were not the only witnesses.
We ask our readers who would have observed the phenomenon to report it directly to the Véronica group, 1 Rue Vauban, 30000 Nîmes.
