Sighting in Lille, October 1, 2007

At 7:40 in the morning, a motorist was driving on the A27 motorway near the Belgian border. To the right, above flat fields, they saw eight white lights arranged in two groups of four, which looked to them like a delta wing. They kept driving, then pulled over onto the hard shoulder. The object appeared stationary at that point. When the witness tried to photograph it with their phone, they made a handling error and got no picture. After a few seconds the object tilted, moved away and vanished. No other witness account was collected.

GEIPAN reopened the original 2008 investigation, which contained errors about where the witness was and which way they were looking. Once corrected, the observation turned out to have taken place to the right of the motorway, at about 30° from the direction of travel. It was raining, daylight had not yet arrived, and horizontal visibility was only 3 to 4 km. In that direction lay a stadium belonging to the Luchin estate, whose renovation was nearly finished and whose 25-metre floodlight pylons were already in place. From the spot where the sighting began, two pylons lined up, showing 4 and 3 spots respectively, exactly as in the witness's sketch. They appeared just above a line of trees, as the object had. Lighting tests were probably under way, which could explain the flickering of one light. The intense glare and poor conditions prevented the witness from making out the pylons.

Some points remain less clear: the size, judged too large, the way the object disappeared, and above all its final tilt, the only real oddity, which was put down to misperception. Despite a single witness and weaknesses in the first investigation, the match on many decisive points led GEIPAN to classify the case as A: very probably floodlights seen from a distance in poor conditions.