The Tananarive green fireball and silent craft

Tananarive, 1954. The capital of French Madagascar sits on a horseshoe of hills in the Highlands. It was winter in the southern hemisphere, and the sky was clear and cloudless. On Monday, 16 August, the first Constellation airliner of the week had just landed. Outside the Air France agency on Avenue de la Libération, the city's widest street, staff waited for the Paris mail. Among them was Air France engineer Edmond Campagnac.

The light was fading. Then a large luminous ball of "a brilliant electric green" came out of the east. It fell, in Campagnac's words, "almost vertically, exactly like a fireball." It seemed to brush the Queen's Palace before vanishing behind the southern hills. The watchers expected an explosion. It never came.

About half a minute later, it was back. It came horizontally over the hills. It reappeared above the Government Palace and hovered over the market. Then it changed direction and followed the avenue.

Up close, Campagnac saw a bright green "lens" in front. Behind it flew a cigar shaped metallic fuselage "with the shine of aluminum", about 40 m long, roughly the size of a DC-4 fuselage. Orange sparks trailed further back.

It passed at about 100 m altitude. It made no sound at all. "Oddly enough, silence had settled in the city." It passed the railway station, veered left and disappeared behind the north-west hills. The whole event lasted about 2 minutes.

Campagnac was not alone. Lights went out as the object passed and came back on behind it. Dogs howled across the city. At the market, the zebu pen broke its barriers, and the army and police were called. At a farm school at La Sakay, herds stampeded into marshes the same evening.

Other witnesses later added their own accounts. Louis Grimout, an artillery adjutant of the garrison, described a dark mass about 100 m long with about a dozen lights like lit portholes, and a general power cut of about 10 minutes. Jeanne Rafaramalala Noro, a secretary at the town hall, saw a very bright green "cigar" with red sparks. A policeman, Razafimahatratra, wrote "soucoupe volante, 18 h, 16 August 1954" on his calendar.

General Pierre Fleurquin, the air commander in Madagascar, reportedly ordered an inquiry. Father Coze, the Jesuit director of the Tananarive observatory, collected the testimony, with about 5,000 witnesses questioned. His report has never been found.

In 1994 Joël Mesnard returned to the case for the journal LDLN and traced 11 witnesses. In 1999 it appeared in the French COMETA report, which called it interesting "because it belongs to the world of aeronautics", and Jean-Jacques Vélasco, director of SEPRA, praised its features.

No photograph, film or radar record exists. In 2004 Campagnac explained, "we did not have a camera in the shoulder-belt." The main sceptical reading is a fireball, which was the first impression of Campagnac and Coze themselves. Eric Maillot put it bluntly: "Take a meteor, make it zig-zag, and there you are: you have a UFO." Critics point to details that shifted between versions over the years, while Patrick Gross disagrees, and sees no contradictions or additions.

Campagnac told the story for 50 years, on radio, in print and on television in Les Dossiers de l'Écran. Thousands may have looked up over Tananarive that evening. What exactly they saw remains open.