Sighting in Joué-lès-Tours, March 7, 2015

At about 1:35 in the morning, a driver and their passenger noticed a bright object moving across the sky. The driver first saw it on the left while driving along a straight stretch of the D37. The object seemed to shift to the right when the road curved left. The driver then pulled over onto the hard shoulder, and the observation lasted three to four minutes. Once the car had stopped, the phenomenon appeared motionless. The passenger took a photograph with a camera. No other witness account was collected.

The GEIPAN investigation concluded that the witnesses had seen the star Capella. The apparent movement was a well-known perceptual illusion: a distant, stationary object with no visual reference points, seen at night from a moving vehicle, seems to move along with the observer. Indeed, once the witnesses stopped, the object "stopped" too. A physiological micro-nystagmus effect was also identified. The shape, colour, brightness, apparent size, azimuth and height all matched Capella. The star probably disappeared behind a bank of clouds.

GEIPAN explained the gap between the account and this ordinary explanation as a mistake in judging distance. The phenomenon appeared above a water tower, so the witnesses took it to be fairly close to the ground and read its apparent movement as real movement. The changes in brightness, probably caused by an unseen veil of cloud, were interpreted as the object moving away or coming closer. The case was classified A.