Sighting in Crozon, January 13, 2020

Early in the morning, the witness was driving along a small country road on the peninsula. The weather was bad, with strong gusts of wind, low cloud cover and rain. To their left, partly hidden by the top of a stand of pine trees, they saw two identical horizontal red rectangles. They slowed down, and a third identical rectangle appeared to the left of the other two, with the same spacing. The whole group looked large and fairly high in the sky. It moved along the road, always on the witness's left and looking the same, toward a crossroads a little further ahead.

The three objects then stopped at the crossroads, facing the witness, who halted shortly before it. They covered about two thirds of the width of the windscreen, offset slightly to the left, and the witness had to lean forward to see all of them. The witness compared them to truck tail lights: bright red, luminous, sharply outlined, with small moving beads inside. Although gusts were shaking the vehicle, the objects stayed still. After a few seconds they left toward the south, shrinking in appearance, at first at moderate speed in a series of bounces, dropping to the horizon, then accelerating and vanishing almost instantly toward the sky, without interacting with the clouds.

GEIPAN found the testimony coherent and detailed, with good consistency, and the phenomenon highly strange. Several hypotheses were examined: drones, helicopters, a lighthouse or signal station, wind turbine lights, a laser or nightclub projector, a reflection in the windscreen, an aircraft, and truck lighting. The last five were ruled out with justification. The Lanvéoc-Poulmic naval air base said none of its aircraft, drones included, were in operation. The large angular size implies the objects were close, and helicopters would have been heard. A Navy drone instructor excluded any military drone lighting signature. A lighthouse would have produced a beam visible in the rain and could not have formed three sharp rectangles, and the witness, who knows the area, would have recognised it. GEIPAN remains cautious because the technical questionnaire was sent five months after the event and the field investigation took place a year later, which can alter a testimony. As no hypothesis was satisfactory, the case was classified D, unexplained.