Sighting in Le Passage, October 8, 2015

At around 5 a.m., a witness noticed a very bright light in a clear sky and was intrigued by it. They placed it in the east, and in a later phone conversation specified that it was below the Moon, to the left. They then took many photographs. Theirs was the only account collected.

The witness noticed another object on the pictures. Nearly all of them show camera shake, to a greater or lesser degree despite the use of a tripod: the witness had pressed the shutter button directly, with no remote release or self-timer, and the long focal length (300 mm) was enough to magnify the shake. The uncropped photos also show a few other bright points, identified with certainty as the stars 31 Leo, Pi Leo, HIP 48876 and HIP 48734, which confirms that the body photographed was Venus.

Four cropped and enhanced shots (7298 to 7301), provided only in part, show a strange saucer-like shape. The original framing shows that on these shots Venus is simply off-centre. The shape is probably a photographic artefact, a stray reflection known as lens flare, unless it was a genuine lenticular cloud, a point on which photography and weather experts were still being consulted. GEIPAN classified the case as A: observation and photographs of Venus, with a probable photographic artefact.