By Captain Duboc:
“My name is Jean-Charles Duboc, and I am a retired Air France Captain.
During Air France Flight 3532 from Nice to London, on 28 January 1994, I observed, with my crew, a daylight UFO near Paris, for one to two minutes of sighting. We had few passengers onboard and none of them had reported that observation to the crew.
The time was 1 p.m., and the visibility was excellent with some altocumulus clouds.
The object had been identified initially by a steward who was in the cockpit and by the co-pilot, as a weather balloon, but when I identified it, it looked quite different. In fact this UFO was in evolution, with a bank angle of 45°. It seemed to be a huge flying disc, like a huge lens. It stabilised and stopped moving.
We observed it on the left of our plane, surprisingly totally stationary in the sky, and it disappeared progressively. This large object was below us at the altitude of 35,000 feet (we were at 39,000 feet), at a distance of about 25 nautical miles. It was absolutely huge because it is impossible to see an aircraft distinctly at that distance.
The colour was red-brown with blurred outlines. The apparent diameter of this object could be compared to the diameter of the moon, or the sun. That means that it was about 1000 feet wide. We had no idea of the structure of the UFO that seemed to be embedded in a kind of magnetic or gravitational fields, with no lights or visual metallic structure, which gave it a really fuzzy appearance. The most incredible aspect is that it became transparent, dematerialized, and disappeared in about 10 to 20 seconds.
My co-pilot, chief steward and I quickly realised that what we were seeing did not resemble anything known to us and we reported the sighting to Reims Airport air traffic control. Simultaneously, the radar of the Operational Centre of the Air Defence (the CODA), registered a one minute spot crossing the track of our plane. They picked up the object about 25 miles east of Paris for 50 seconds.
When I recorded the estimated position of the UFO on an aeronautical map, I was surprised to realise that its position was near the air base of Taverny which hosts the headquarters of the French Strategic Air Command. This sighting has been studied by the French military COMETA group under the direction of General Denis Letty and with the participation of several high ranking officers of the French Defence, as well as by GEPAN under the French National Space Centre (CNES).
The investigations determined this could not have been a weather balloon, and estimated the approximate length of the UFO to have been 800 feet.
This sighting remains unexplained.”
Captain Duboc believes the object he saw was from another world. He said that in the last 60 years, there have been approximately 1300 sightings by pilots and about 15% have been confirmed by radar.
“It is a really scary reality, but pilots have exceptional training and are the best qualified observers to identify UFOs.
Air France flight 3532 UFO sighting radar track associated to the incident.
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