Sighting in Fontrailles, October 31, 2017

At around 6:05 pm, three witnesses in a garden noticed a point of light due east. They then made out three white points of light that seemed to sit at the ends of a charcoal-grey object. No sound was heard. The lights went out and the object vanished completely. One witness took a photograph that includes ground landmarks and the Moon, and described the light as fading gradually until three lights in a triangle could be seen.

The investigation identified a Airbus test aircraft (an A350/900), not a scheduled flight. It was flying at about 4,000 m and roughly 360 km/h with its lights on, and its path stayed pointed toward the witnesses for a long time, which gave an impression of near-stationarity: its height in the sky rose only from 2 to 5° as it closed from about 100 km to about 40 km. The duration of that stretch of the path, about ten minutes, and the direction of observation (around 103° azimuth) match the witness accounts and the photograph, in which the position relative to the Moon is also consistent. The dimming and final extinction of the light were explained by the aircraft's turn, which broke the alignment of its lights.

Two explanations were put forward for the three points: the separate lights on the wings and nose gear, or sunlight reflecting off the tail, the winglets or the undersides of the wings during the turn, since the aircraft was still lit by the sun at that altitude. The second is plausible but can be neither proven nor disproven, and it does not weaken the identification. The testimonies were somewhat inconsistent, with possible influence between witnesses, and the original photo files could not be obtained despite repeated requests from GEIPAN. The case was classified A: aircraft observation.