Sighting in Les Baroches, February 3, 2019

In the late morning, a witness was walking across fields when they noticed a grey mass beneath the cloud cover that looked like a small cloud. It moved very fast even though there was little wind. Suddenly it changed altitude until it vanished into the clouds, then performed several maneuvers before disappearing on a descending path. To the naked eye, it left a trail resembling rain falling in the distance, lasting about 3 seconds. The witness had time to film the scene with a mobile phone. No other testimony was collected.

The investigation noted several apparent oddities: the change of shape at the end, the non-linear path, the entry into the clouds, the dive toward the ground and the lack of sound. However, the shape of the mass, its dark appearance, its trajectory and its final dive strongly match a flock of birds in flight, an explanation that accounts for every aspect of the observation. The cloud ceiling was low, only about 500 meters above the ground, so a few seconds spent inside the clouds is nothing unusual. It is very likely that a flock of birds, starlings in particular, passed just below the clouds before dropping toward the ground on spotting a source of food or a place to rest. GEIPAN classified the case as A: a very highly probable flock of birds in flight.