Sighting in (can) Chasseneuil-du-Poitou, September 24, 2009

At around 7 p.m., a 7-year-old child was playing in the garden when the noise of a plane coming from the southwest drew their attention. Behind the aircraft, the child noticed an opaque white object shaped like a rectangular box. The object tilted to pass under the plane, then dropped abruptly and steadied itself beneath a high-voltage line. It then moved toward the TV antenna of the neighbouring house, about 10 m away, shot upward at very high speed, stopped dead, and then headed straight up and vanished into the sky. The sighting lasted 20 to 30 seconds. The sky was clear and cloudless. No other witness account was reported to GEIPAN.

The account came from the child's father, who had also reported an earlier sighting of lights that turned out to be Thai lanterns. A questionnaire and a drawing were faxed to GEIPAN in October 2009. The wind was blowing from the north-northeast at an average of about 17 km/h, so the object moved against the wind, and silently. No usual explanation fits these characteristics.

Because the testimony was secondhand, GEIPAN did not think it worthwhile to question the child further. Their sincerity was not doubted, but a child of that age can be influenced, even unconsciously, and may exaggerate or over-interpret things that were perhaps ordinary. The earlier lantern episode may have made the child more anxious or more alert to oddities in the sky. The case was classified C, for lack of reliable information.