Sighting in Le Mans, March 24, 2024

One evening, the witness was in the living room of their apartment when they looked at the full Moon. Next to it, they noticed a golden-yellow sphere. They photographed the scene with their phone through an open window and saw the object on the preview screen. On a second picture, taken later, it seemed to have vanished. When they went back over the photos, they found it was also on the second one, almost merged with the lunar disc. The witness never saw the object move; the movement was inferred from its successive positions in the two photographs.

The field investigation, which included a cognitive interview, showed that the witness had reversed the order of the two shots in their memory. They had probably meant to photograph the Moon without having noticed the object, spotted it when taking the second picture, and lost sight of it immediately afterwards, hidden by trees. From the witness's viewpoint, the object moved from left to right. Analysis of the photographs with IPACO gave the time of the shots, 19:43, from the file timestamps, since the phone generated no metadata. It also showed that the object could not be a simple lens reflection, that its round shape was probably an artefact, and that it was more likely point-like. The apparent movement was about 1.5°, between azimuths of 99° and 100.5°.

Two hypotheses were examined. For the aircraft-light hypothesis, the presence of an aircraft along the line of sight could be neither confirmed nor ruled out: CAPCODA data were unusable because of a timing problem, and private tracking sites provided nothing. For the LED balloon hypothesis, the wind direction did not match the observed movement, although a margin of error remained. Because of insufficient data, GEIPAN classified the case as C.