Sighting in Istres, January 25, 2009

Around 7 p.m., several people at home noticed a light in the sky that caught their attention. One of the witnesses filmed it. In the zoomed footage it looked like a luminous ball surrounded by a blue halo, and it seemed to move in circles. The main witness reported that the phenomenon came back at the start of the night over the following days.

The investigation established that what had been seen on several consecutive days, and filmed for several minutes, was the planet Venus. This conclusion appears in the gendarmerie report, and the main witness accepted it. Venus, very bright at magnitude -4.5, was indeed in the part of the sky that the witness had observed and filmed. GEIPAN therefore classified the case as A: an identified astronomical observation.