Sighting in Loctudy, May 13, 2025

At around 11 p.m., from the garden of their home, the main witness saw a steady orange light pass overhead, followed by two other flashing orange lights. The three lights marked out a very dark, fairly large triangle moving slowly and at low altitude from north to south. The object gave off a fairly loud rumble, like distant thunder, which was still audible after the lights had gone by. According to the witness, the observation, both visual and auditory, lasted nine to ten minutes in total. Their neighbour and their partner also saw the phenomenon and heard the rumble, but did not send their accounts to the GEIPAN. The witness had checked specialised flight-tracking websites and found no aircraft over their position at that time. With no photo or video, and only one witness having completed the questionnaire, the case's consistency was rated as medium.

The investigation found that the witness had seen military aircraft taking part in the "Poker" exercise. The radar reconstruction supplied by the CAPCODA confirmed that a group of several aircraft flew over the witnesses shortly before 11 p.m.: five were present in the same time window, and three of them had similar speeds and altitudes. A slight offset in their altitude and position could have made them look, from the ground, like a single larger, closer, dark triangular object. The lights were most likely the position lights and anti-collision lights, whose whitish-orange tint could have looked orange. The rumble is consistent with such a flyover. The apparent slowness is explained by a speed that is moderate for fighter jets (about 700 to 750 km/h) at a fairly high altitude (6 to 7 km). The dark triangular shape was very probably a perceptual illusion, common at night when several identical points of light are seen together. Such military aircraft do not usually appear on public tracking websites, which explains why the witness's searches found nothing. The GEIPAN classified the case as A.