Sighting in La Foa, March 2, 1984

At around 8 p.m., two witnesses who were at home saw a fireball giving off white light. It moved slowly at low altitude and vanished behind trees. The witnesses gave no duration and no apparent size.

A week later the gendarmerie was told that several residents of the neighbourhood had repeatedly seen luminous phenomena, and it took their statements in a single report. Those sightings involved other witnesses, on other dates and with different movements, so GEIPAN examined each one separately.

A slow-moving luminous ball can suggest an aircraft or a satellite. However, the record of air operations drawn up just after the events showed nothing, and neither did a check of satellite passes made 35 years later. The observation therefore remains strange.

Its consistency is weak, though. The two witnesses gave very short, almost identical accounts using the same words and expressed no sense of surprise, as if they had agreed on their story before being questioned. One of them had spoken of other similar sightings, but the description given to the gendarmes of the first differed markedly from another witness's account, and the second was not mentioned. The case was classified C: potentially strange, but unusable for lack of reliable information.