Sighting in Lagnieu, April 14, 2016

At about 9:50 one morning, a witness and their father were driving at roughly 30 km/h along a dirt track on their way to work on farmland. The weather was fine, with a little wind and a temperature of 16°. The father spotted something in the sky first and pointed it out to the witness. It was a black ring, motionless, above a wood about 500 m away. The witness placed it to the south-west, in the direction of Saint-Vulbas.

The witness quickly grabbed a mobile phone and filmed and photographed the ring through the lowered passenger window for 2 to 2.5 minutes, without stopping the vehicle. The ring then disappeared, breaking apart "like a small cloud". A newspaper article published a few days later suggested that other people had seen it too, but only one testimony was collected. A video and six photographs exist.

The gendarmerie's inquiry found that explosives tests had been carried out that day on the Valbonne military camp. GEIPAN concluded that the witnesses had seen a smoke ring produced by pyrotechnic devices during those tests. The site was fairly far away, so the witnesses probably did not hear the detonations, or heard them later without connecting them to the ring. The very light wind could have let the ring hold its shape for several minutes. The case has low strangeness, which stems mainly from the unusual look of the phenomenon, which the witnesses had probably never seen before. The case was classified A.