Sighting in Ambres, September 9, 2024

At around 11 p.m., a witness was standing on the front steps of their home when they noticed an intense point of light in the sky to the north-east, giving off a beam of white light. It moved in a straight line toward them, much as an ordinary aircraft would. As it came closer, a red light and a blue light appeared on either side of the beam, along with a white light at the rear, positioned like the one on an aircraft's tail fin. When the object passed overhead, the witness saw a white luminous rectangle in which several lights of different colours were flashing.

The witness moved to keep watching and then heard an engine noise, a soft, continuous vibration. The object kept a constant speed until it disappeared over the horizon. The witness's partner came out too, but the object was already too far away to be seen in detail. Only the first witness wished to give testimony, no photo was taken, and the account contains a mistake in the date and imprecision about the time and duration, so the case has low consistency.

The investigation concluded that it was an airliner on approach to Toulouse airport. The red, white and green lights (blue is sometimes mistaken for green) were in the usual positions, and the initial beam was most likely the landing lights. The 30 to 40 seconds of observation and the sound are consistent with an aircraft at about 2,000 m altitude. Air navigation data confirmed a Lufthansa flight whose path matched perfectly, passing over the area at 11:16 p.m., one minute after the end of the observation as stated, which was itself approximate. The flashing luminous zone seen directly overhead was probably the structure holding the landing lights, or part of the fuselage hidden by the glare. The coloured flashes remain hard to interpret with certainty; a plausible hypothesis is an optical effect, with the powerful lights producing coloured reflections on airborne particles. GEIPAN classified the case as A.