Sighting in Carbon-Blanc, January 30, 2015

At around 7 p.m., a driver was travelling on the Bordeaux ring road when a very intense bluish light suddenly appeared and covered everything in their field of vision. It lasted about 2 seconds. Frightened, the driver heard no particular noise. They first thought of an emergency vehicle's flashing light and looked in the rear-view mirror for such a vehicle, but saw none. Nothing was reported on the radio. The driver carried on, dazed. The witness made a drawing of what they had seen, and no other account of the event was collected.

The investigation considered two possible explanations for this sudden, violent lighting of the sky: an exceptionally powerful lightning flash or a bolide (a falling meteorite). Lightning records show strikes near the area that day, but only between 1 and 2 p.m. At Bordeaux-Mérignac, the sky was overcast with a light westerly wind of 4 to 15 km/h, which does not quite match the witness's description of rain and strong wind. The account pointed more towards lightning, which the weather records do not confirm but which remains possible. No bolide was recorded by automatic cameras, though cloud cover over France was almost total at the time. Since nothing allowed either hypothesis to be confirmed, GEIPAN classified the case as C.