Sighting in Aix-en-Provence, August 30, 2007

At around 7 p.m., a witness looking at the sky through a window noticed a flash of light like a star in a clear sky. They grabbed their camcorder and started filming. The brightness then faded, and the witness made out a small dark object, which eventually became just a dark patch moving across the sky. Intrigued, they went to another room to keep following it. Zooming in, they saw four black dots or squares around the flash. The sighting lasted less than 25 seconds, and no other witness account was collected.

The investigation concluded that the phenomenon was a very bright point of light, most likely sunlight reflecting off a flying object. The four black rectangles around the white point on the video were clearly artefacts, meaning spurious effects of the video sensor and of compression. The mistral was blowing hard that day, from the north to north-west, while the object moved from the north-east to the south-west, so an object carried by the wind was very unlikely. An aircraft or helicopter could have acted as a mirror toward the sun, which was low on the horizon, due west, at 8°, and the strong wind could have masked the noise of the machine. The investigation took place too late to confirm this hypothesis. GEIPAN classified the case as C because of insufficient information and cross-checking.