Sighting in Le Bar-sur-Loup, September 1, 2006

A witness was taking photographs of a film shoot in their village. They had noticed nothing in the sky at the time, but when they looked through the pictures they found an unfamiliar spot on one of them. They then contacted the gendarmerie des transports aériens to make a statement.

The gendarmerie carried out a thorough investigation. It ruled out a weather phenomenon, but found an unidentified radar track: three plots recorded by the Nice primary radar at about the time the photo was taken, showing a sudden, extremely rapid acceleration of the presumed object. This lead was later set aside in favour of a commercial airliner, flight 7637, passing through.

Another explanation then emerged. The company that maintains the bell-tower clock said pigeons landing on the hands disrupted the clock's operation. A colony therefore lives in the tower, and the photo clearly shows many pigeons on the ledge below the clock. A bird crossing the frame is thus entirely plausible, and the blur could have been caused by wingbeats. The available evidence does not allow a firm choice between the two hypotheses, but a pigeon, despite some uncertainties, was judged more likely than the commercial flight. Either way, a conventional explanation exists, and GEIPAN classified the case as B.