Sighting in La Roche-Blanche, March 9, 2019

At around 1:50 a.m., someone driving on the A75 saw a luminous phenomenon for just two to three seconds, in the direction of Clermont-Ferrand. They saw a fairly strong orange halo very clearly, about the size of a 1-euro coin held at arm's length. The halo was moving: it climbed quickly in a very tight circular motion, then faded out behind a cloud. Its path looked like an inverted comma, going from bottom to top and starting on the left. It was seen at an angle of about 50 degrees and an estimated distance of 2 km. It left no trail and did not change color. Its brightness stayed constant, except as it passed behind the cloud.

There was only one witness. The account describes the phenomenon and its surroundings well, but the sighting was very brief and the witness was driving, which limits the reliability of the testimony. The witness recognized what they had seen in a video about ball lightning, and that hypothesis is consistent with the phenomenon's characteristics. However, the weather that night was not favorable to such an event, which the Laboratoire de Recherche sur la Foudre confirmed. The brevity of the sighting and its context did not allow a satisfactory hypothesis to be put forward. GEIPAN rated the strangeness as medium and the consistency as low, and classified the case C because of a lack of usable information.