Sighting in Choisy-le-Roi, May 21, 2012

At about 10:12 p.m., a driver noticed a luminous phenomenon moving from north to south beneath an overcast sky, and it caught their attention. Stopped at a red light, the witness made out a cylindrical shape that looked like an icon with its point facing the ground. They got out of the vehicle and saw that the object was hanging motionless, with a powerful light shining from small portholes. An orange luminous sphere surrounded the object.

The object then climbed away, took on the shape of an inverted V, turned white, and vanished into the cloud layer. The whole sighting lasted 15 seconds. There was only one witness and no photograph.

GEIPAN considered the account very precise and fairly consistent, but noted that it was surprising that nobody else in the middle of a city saw the phenomenon. The only plausible hypothesis considered, a festive balloon, fit poorly with several features: the unusual shape, the lit portholes, the stop above the road facing the witness, and the departure after a few seconds with a change of shape. The case was classified D (unexplained), under "D1", as the observation of an object of unknown nature whose physical and dynamic characteristics do not strictly match any known flying object.