Fort-de-France, Martinique: French submarine crews see luminous object loop and vanish

At 9:15 p.m. the French submarines Junon (S648) and Daphné (S641), escorted by the logistic support vessel Rhône, were anchored off Fort-de-France when a large luminous object the color of a fluorescent tube arrived slowly and silently from the west. Michel Figuet on the Junon fetched six pairs of binoculars from the conning tower for his companions. The 300 witnesses included four officers on the Junon, three on the Daphné, a dozen sailors and weather observatory personnel; they saw a large ball of light or a disc on edge moving horizontally from west to east about 6 miles south of the ships, leaving a whitish trace. Directly south of the ships it dropped, made two complete loops, hovered in a faint halo and vanished “like a bulb turned off,” while trail and halo stayed visible for a full minute. At 9:45 p.m. the halo reappeared and the object switched on again, rose, made two more loops and flew west, disappearing at 9:50 p.m. Eberhart cites Jacques Vallée's estimate of its optical power output in the Journal of Scientific Exploration (1998). The account follows the entry in George M. Eberhart's chronology UFOs and Intelligence (CUFOS) and the sources cited there; it is not an independent determination by From Beyond Space.