Tananarive mass sighting and blackout

August 1954. Madagascar is French. Its capital, Tananarive, now Antananarivo, spreads over high ridges crowned by the Queen's Palace. Below runs Avenue de la Libération, from Soarano station to the Analakely market, past the city hall. At the door of the Air France agency stood Edmond Campagnac, head of Air France technical services, a polytechnicien and pilot. He was talking with his staff. "It was a Monday in August 1954."

Around 5 pm, by most accounts, a "large luminous ball of a brilliant electric green" appeared. It came down "almost vertically, just like a meteorite." It seemed to graze the Queen's Palace. Then it vanished behind the hills to the south.

About a minute later it came back. Larger now. "Flying horizontally this time at breakneck speed." It circled the high parts of the city and swept down Avenue de la Libération, 50 to 150 metres up. Campagnac saw "a kind of lens shaped plasma, of approximately 40 meters length, the size of a DC4 aircraft." Close behind it came a body with "a distinct silvery metallic aspect and the shape of a football," trailing bluish flames.

It was "totally silent." Public and shop lights "died out exactly at the moment the craft passed above them, and functioned again at once behind its passage." Dogs howled across the city. At the market, animals fell into "total panic." An hour earlier, a noisy Lockheed Constellation had passed over without troubling them. Then the object slipped behind the hills to the west.

The next morning, Campagnac learned that around 6 pm, moments after leaving Tananarive, it had flown very low over the zebu park at La Sakay, a farming settlement some 140 to 170 km to the west. The herds stampeded. Louis Grimout, who watched from a dentist's surgery on the avenue, later insisted the capital "was deprived of electricity for about ten minutes."

Pierre Fleurquin, air commander in Madagascar, reportedly asked for an inquiry. Father R.P. Coze, a Jesuit at the Tananarive observatory, was given the report. Campagnac never received it, and it apparently disappeared after Coze's death. A police report is said to have burned in a fire at the Hôtel de Ville. No record of the inquiry has been found in French Air Force archives. No photographs exist.

Decades later, Jean-Jacques Vélasco, head of SEPRA, discussed the case, and the 1999 COMETA report cited it as an example. French Wikipedia claims it pushed de Gaulle toward an official study body that became GEPAN in 1977. That claim has no source.

Skeptics see a meteor. A green ball falling steeply with sparks is a classic fireball. Eric Maillot put it bluntly: "Take a meteor, make it zig-zag, and there you are: you have a UFO." Critics add that so many witnesses suggests a high, distant object, that animals reacted to the Chelyabinsk fireball in 2013, and that a bright meteor could trip the photo-sensors of street lighting. They also note that the first detailed account appeared only in 1964, ten years later, and that the details have shifted ever since.

Campagnac went on to preside over GEPA and told his story on French television in 1969 and again in 2001. In 2004, Le Journal de l'Île marked the 50th anniversary by interviewing survivors. The report Father Coze was asked to write has never been found.