Sighting in Étupes, August 22, 2017

At 4:30 in the morning, from the first floor of their home, the witness noticed a light in the sky to the east that stayed motionless. For about half an hour they photographed and filmed it with a tablet and a camcorder. They were the only witness interviewed. They described the object as a big star, with no change of path and not much movement.

The witness also filmed outdoors at daybreak, in a sequence that showed landscape features. This made it possible to place the phenomenon at an azimuth of about 84° at 6:08 that day. A Stellarium simulation for the same time puts Venus at that azimuth, with an apparent magnitude of -4. After the Sun and the Moon, Venus is the brightest natural object in the sky.

The shapes and colors on the zoomed images are explained by the equipment. With this kind of device, focusing on such a distant object is impossible, and zooming on a point of light produces optical and electronic artifacts. The shape, a circle with a point at the bottom, changed as the camera moved and came from the diaphragm, where a defect could account for the shape seen in all the zoomed videos. The colors were chromatic aberrations caused by the defocusing. The strangeness the witness perceived therefore came mostly from what they saw through their devices. With the naked eye alone, they might not have reported it. GEIPAN classed the case as A: it was definitely Venus.