Sighting in La Croix-Valmer, January 21, 2007

The witness was out for a walk in the early afternoon and took several photographs. When the pictures were developed, they noticed black dots that appeared again and again at the center of the sun. They had seen nothing unusual while taking the photos. It was only after a TV program in 2008 that they sent the GEIPAN the questionnaire and the photographs.

GEIPAN points out that it no longer handles this kind of report, where the oddity shows up only when looking at a photo or video and was not seen by the witness with their own eyes at the time. Experience shows that, sometimes after considerable work, such cases can be explained by artifacts caused by how the camera works, and these have become more common because smartphones are now so widely used. This case was nevertheless published for information.

It illustrates the "black sun" phenomenon. When a camera is pointed at a very concentrated light source such as the solar disk, one would expect the image to be uniformly saturated, and therefore white. However, some sensors, generally CMOS ones, render these ultra-bright areas as black instead, as the witness's photos 78 and 82 show in particular. An IPACO expert report describes the technical mechanism in more detail. GEIPAN therefore classified the case as A: photographic artifact.