Sighting in Aurore Boreale — Saint-Pierre-Quiberon, March 13, 1989

On the evening of 13 March 1989, between 10:30 pm and 11:28 pm, several witnesses in the Morbihan and the Yvelines noticed a large luminous phenomenon within the cloud layers. The colors they reported varied widely: yellow, green and red.

The gendarmerie units that investigated linked the phenomenon to the solar eruption that occurred around the same time and was covered by the media. The SEPRA had originally classified the case as B, a "spectacular natural phenomenon of light propagation". GEIPAN reexamined it and found that the observation duration, size and colors match those of an aurora borealis, a well-known astronomical phenomenon, and that an aurora was indeed observed, exceptionally, in France on 13 March 1989. It is quite normal that the witnesses did not recognize it at once, since the phenomenon is rarely seen from mainland France, roughly once every ten years. The case, of low strangeness, is now classified A: observation of an aurora borealis.