Sighting in Chartèves, May 20, 2020

At around 11 p.m., on a night with a clear sky, the witness went out into their garden. For more than half an hour they watched two phenomena, one toward the west and the other toward the east. Each was made up of five white balls moving in different directions. Red points moved quickly away from them. The witness called their spouse and their son over to look as well. No sound was heard. The witness then went to bed.

According to GEIPAN, the main oddity of the case was seeing five balls with erratic movements in two different parts of the sky. The case was rated as moderately consistent: there were two witnesses, but the directions in which the phenomena appeared remained imprecise. The most likely explanation is a mix-up with two stars, Arcturus and Vega, located roughly in the directions the witness gave. The very long observation time supports this, as does the autocinetic effect, an optical illusion well known to astronomers in which a fixed point of light seems to move erratically in the dark. The witness's description fits this illusion well. It does not, however, account for the red points, which only the witness reported, since their spouse did not see them. GEIPAN classified the case as B: a probable misidentification of celestial objects.