Orly Airport Radar and Air France DC-3 Sighting

February 1956. Paris was in the grip of an exceptionally cold winter. On the night of 17 to 18 February the sky over Orly airport was clear. No clouds. No storm. In the radar room, about ten technicians under their chief, Deveaux, watched the scopes.

At 22:50 an echo appeared. It was "a size twice higher than that of the largest planes then in service." The operators thought their set had broken down. A second display showed the same thing.

Its speed ranged "from total immobility to a speed of 1500 miles per hour." In the account of the writer Aimé Michel, it seemed to know where the radio beacons were. With no plane in sight, it left the radar field vertically. It came back only to rush toward approaching aircraft. When Orly phoned Le Bourget for confirmation, the radar was jammed by powerful interference. The operators changed frequency. The jamming followed.

Then came the Air France DC-3 F-BAXI. At about 1,500 metres, above Les Mureaux, the stationary echo was seen on the radar screen "accelerating at great speed and heading toward the DC-3." Pilot Michel Desavoye saw a flashing red light coming at him, "twice larger than position lights normally are." He changed course. The light vanished, then reappeared on the Le Bourget side. "It was in no case a plane," he said, "for we would have seen its position lights." According to Michel, the co-pilot saw the object itself. Enormous. Black against the sky.

Other crews saw the light that night, among them Swissair 103 from London and a Constellation that landed beneath the stationary object. Radar technician Baruc called the three-hour watch "uncanny!"

Desavoye landed back in Paris at 5 a.m. The radar technicians and an Air Force colonel questioned him. The next day a commander asked him to deny the facts to calm the press and radio. He refused. He kept repeating exactly what he had seen. His radio operator, Baupetuy, and his mechanic had seen it too.

The French General Staff reportedly interviewed Deveaux and the ten technicians. One account gives its verdict as "undetermined cause." Fighters from Tours were delayed, and accounts disagree on whether they ever arrived. Michel quoted an unnamed member of the US Air Force inquiry: "They are totally unexplainable." Some later accounts say the Americans blamed Venus. No Project Blue Book record confirming that has surfaced.

The Paris Observatory suggested a US weather balloon carried by the jet stream. Critics said no balloon could reach such speeds, and Desavoye called it "certainly not a weather balloon." L'Express floated a secret observation apparatus or parasitic interference. Skeptics have since proposed super-refraction and ground clutter in the extreme cold, interference between the Orly and Le Bourget radars, or military countermeasures. For the red light, they point to Sirius or Venus. They also note that the object's apparent intelligence comes from Michel's 1963 retelling, not from documents of the time.

The affair made Paris-Match, Le Figaro and the German magazine Quick, which called it a "Ghost ship over Paris." In 2017 France Inter's Affaires sensibles retold it as "Le Fantôme d'Orly." It stands beside Washington in July 1952 and Lakenheath and Bentwaters in August 1956 among the classic radar-visual cases. No French military or civil aviation file has ever surfaced in the public record.