Sighting in Bessines-sur-Gartempe, October 5, 1993

At around 6:20 pm, several people in a garden near a wood saw coloured lights appear in a clearing. A few moments later, the witnesses heard a sound like thunder and saw a flash. The lights in the clearing then disappeared. The witnesses decided not to go and look.

When the GEIPAN re-examined the case, it noted that the witnesses used words usually linked to thunderstorms (lightning, thunder, detonation), and that their arguments against a storm were not very convincing. Nobody had checked that the glows actually came from the wood: they could have been distant flashes from the north or north-west, seen through the trees. The garden lies on the southern slope of a wooded dome and the clearing near its top, so the light crossed little tree cover. The Sauvagnac radio station reported heavy rain and distant storms with lightning in several directions from 8 pm, which fits a storm about 12 km to the north half an hour to an hour earlier. The Limoges weather service, asked only about 6 pm, noted nothing unusual. The witnesses, who were friends, had been drinking in the afternoon, which may have heightened the sense of strangeness. A detonation was also heard from the home of another person, closer to the presumed source of the noise.

The GEIPAN could not state that a storm was the cause, but gave it a probability above 50%. No angular bearings or durations of the glows were recorded, so the testimonies were barely usable. The case was classified B: thunderstorm.