Sighting in Grand Bourgtheroulde, February 13, 2023

Between 10 and 13 February 2023, a driver travelling between Grand Bourgtheroulde and Rouen saw the same thing four days in a row, at the same time of day. On the last day, they filmed it with their mobile phone. Because there was no information about the first three days, the GEIPAN studied only the 13 February sighting, the one with the video. It was a moving point of light in the night sky. There was a single witness, and the video was the physical evidence in the file. The case was rated as having low strangeness and good consistency, meaning a good amount of reliable, objectively verified information.

The investigation first considered an astronomical object, but the short duration of the sighting and the fast movement described by the witness did not fit. A fireball was ruled out because no reports had been recorded by monitoring networks for that date and area.

A closer look at the video showed that the point of light appeared at the same moment as a truck with a powerful headlight approaching head-on toward the witness's car. Analysis with the IPACO software revealed an unwanted optical reflection on the opposite side of the image centre from the light source, and its position matched that of the observed point. The point also moved in step with the truck's headlight. Other, fainter points in the video were the same effect, caused by the headlights of the vehicles following the truck, which dazzled the camera's sensor less. The case was classified A: camera artefacts caused by vehicle headlights, known as ghost images.