Sighting in Dreux (28) 31.05.2018 Ti1, May 31, 2018

At around 10 p.m., a teenager noticed that the stormy sky had a very yellow color. Intrigued, they filmed it with a mobile phone from the balcony. A few minutes later, they told their mother they had filmed "something weird." The mother gave the account on their behalf, and no other witness came forward.

The video showed a very bright point moving quickly. The parent insisted that the child had first seen it with their own eyes and then filmed it, looking straight at the sky while turning the phone around in their hand. GEIPAN objected that it is very hard to spot such a fast phenomenon by eye and start recording in time. It also pointed to the unusual way of filming and to a changing description: in the initial account, the child said they had filmed, not seen, something weird. The parent held to this position and refused to allow the questionnaire and the exchanges to be published.

Using the IPACO tool on several frames taken from the video, the analysis showed that the bright point was each time located opposite the Sun, mirrored through the center of the image. This is a classic optical reflection: the lens duplicates a very strong light source, in weaker form, symmetrically. When the camera pans across the sky, the reflection moves twice as fast. GEIPAN concluded that it was a photographic artifact, perceived on the device screen rather than through direct observation, and classified the case as A.