Sighting in L'Éguille, March 16, 1980

At around half past midnight, three witnesses noticed an orange-yellow luminous mass in a overcast night sky with low cloud. For about 45 minutes they followed its silent movements, while also coming and going a few times, notably to alert the gendarmerie. The phenomenon disappeared quickly between Marennes and Rochefort. All three described a very strong, even dazzling brightness, and one of them said the surrounding landscape was lit up as if in broad daylight. That same witness also mentioned a "small luminous tail". No other testimony was collected. The gendarmerie report included a sketch of the movement and the landscape, a location plan and an annotated photographic plate.

Two hypotheses were examined. The first was a poacher's spotlight, used for glass eel fishing on the Seudre, with its beam striking the low cloud layer. The shape, the estimated dimensions and the luminous tail fitted this idea, but such a spotlight is white, the brightness described could not be produced this way, and the poacher's behavior seemed unlikely. The second was a nightclub spotlight: it matched the direction of observation toward the coast, the shape, the movements, the color and the Saturday-to-Sunday night. It was contradicted, however, by the brightness, by the fact that the relevant venues were closed out of season, and by distances that were too great, although a closer local installation could no longer be checked.

No hypothesis was therefore probable enough. The file lacked important data, such as azimuths from each witness (only one gave any) and elevation angles. As a field investigation was no longer possible, the case was assessed as if one had been carried out with a neutral result, and classified D (unexplained), on the borderline of being unusable for lack of consistency.