Sighting in Libourne, March 4, 2012

At around 8 p.m., a driver and their passenger, stopped at a stop sign, saw four white lights move past from right to left, forming the four corners of a rectangle several metres above the ground. The lights vanished at treetop height. The witnesses heard no particular noise, and the sight left them puzzled.

GEIPAN first considered a luminous object carried by the wind, but the wind was blowing from the west, while the lights had moved from south to north. A check with military air traffic control for possible aircraft came back negative. A GEIPAN investigator then went to the site at night. They observed, and recorded on video, that the headlights of cars coming toward the observer reflect off the overhead railway lines. These reflections travel from right to left and then disappear, just as the witnesses had described.

The phenomenon the witnesses saw was therefore very probably the same one. The witness did not wish to meet the investigator to refine the inquiry. GEIPAN classified the case as B: probably reflections of car headlights on the railway overhead lines.