The Fort-de-France Light, Martinique

In September 1965 the French submarine Junon was making a ten day stop in the harbour at Fort-de-France, on Martinique in the French West Indies. With her lay a second submarine, the Daphné, and the logistics support ship B.S.L. Rhône. Aboard the Junon served Michel Figuet, quartermaster chief helmsman.

Monday 20 September 1965, about 21:15. The crews were on duty when a round object appeared from the west, "in the direction of the Panama Canal." Figuet described it as "de la couleur et la taille de la Lune", the colour and size of the Moon. One retelling gave it the colour of a fluorescent tube and the brightness of the full Moon. It arrived slowly and silently.

It moved toward the southern horizon, leaving a wide trail. It came down toward the hills in two loops. Then it held still, wrapped in a white halo, with two red traces beneath it. Then the object was gone. The trail and the halo stayed in the sky for about two more minutes.

Figuet had time to climb to the conning tower, where he took six pairs of binoculars. Nobody went for a camera. At 21:45 the halo returned to the same place. The object was inside it. It repeated the same path, trailing a wake Figuet called "comparable à celle d'avions à réaction, mais plus large", comparable to that of jet aircraft, but wider. By 21:50, in one account, it was over.

About one third of the crew on duty saw it, according to Figuet's account in Lumières dans la Nuit. Four officers of the Junon were among them. Residents of the prefecture and staff of the meteorological observatory watched too. Estimates run from "several hundred" to 300 witnesses, but only Figuet is named. The versions differ on details: two loops or three complete loops, one event or two, a heading south or west to east.

No official navy report has surfaced. Figuet told his story in the AAMT bulletin UFO-Informations and in Lumières dans la Nuit in May 1975. In 1993 he sent his testimony to Michel Monnerie. That document is now held at the Archives nationales.

Jacques Vallée discussed the case in Confrontations (1990) and in a 1998 paper in the Journal of Scientific Exploration, treating it as a light bright enough to estimate its power output. The case was also presented to the 1997 scientific panel directed by Peter A. Sturrock of Stanford. Overall, the panel found no evidence of unknown physical processes. It gave no verdict on Martinique.

The French sceptic Éric Maillot looked for a rocket or missile and found records of cannon firings. He passed his research to Manuel Borraz. In April 2010, in Anomalia, Borraz concluded that the sightings were sounding rocket launches from Barbados, pointing to Gerald Bull and his HARP project, which fired research projectiles from a giant gun on the island. One question stays open in the record. Barbados lies east-southeast of Martinique. Figuet always said the object came from the west.

Figuet joined the AAMT in 1972 and became a ufologist himself. He died in Mâcon on 18 October 2000. The Spanish sceptic Luis R. González wrote that he died without learning "the true nature" of what he saw. Nobody has ever questioned his honesty. For Vallée it was a measurable light, for Borraz a launch from Barbados. For the sailors on deck that night, it was a Moon that looped, stopped and came back.