Sighting in Bourg-lès-Valence, August 6, 2016

At around 9 p.m., a driver and their passenger noticed two luminous phenomena in the sky that seemed to hold still. The driver stopped and took two photographs. Only one witness account was collected. The first image showed a bright trail that did not move; the second showed a black spot to the right of an aircraft trail. The spot had not been seen with the naked eye and appeared only in the photo, most likely an insect close to the camera.

In the written statement, the witness described a phenomenon that stayed motionless for 11 minutes. In a phone interview, they gave a different version: they had spotted the trail while driving, stopped, photographed it, then took the second picture. They looked for the trail in the viewfinder, but the second photo was heavily zoomed and framed on another part of the sky. Their friend told them the phenomenon had vanished. The two kept watching the sky without seeing it again, and the whole episode lasted 11 minutes by the watch.

The investigation established that the description and the photo matched an aircraft condensation trail. The plane was identified using Flightradar: it was flying due west at sunset, a setup that produces very bright trails. The real observation time was probably 2 to 3 minutes. In that time the aircraft went from an elevation of 4-5° (115 km away) to 8-9° (70 km), a change small enough to look like stillness, especially as the observation was not continuous. The disappearance is explained by the plane entering darkness once the setting sun no longer lit it directly. GEIPAN classified the case A. It also shows how emotion and excitement can make a account imprecise or exaggerated, often without the witness realizing it.