Sighting in Loiret, January 9, 2020

On the evening of 9 January 2020, four military personnel on a security team at an air base reported unidentified red lights north of the base. A Gendarmerie patrol went to the spot but found nothing in particular. Three other witnesses, independent of the first group, described similar sightings. The file brings together these seven accounts, most of them detailed. Two videos filmed by one of the witnesses made analysis possible.

The lights were red and very bright, either point-like or ball-shaped depending on distance. Each one stayed visible for a few seconds at most. They rose quickly, then came down more slowly along an arc or curve. Three witnesses mentioned a trail, either luminous and the same colour as the light, or white like smoke. Two witnesses were surprised by the speed of the lights, and two others found their apparently horizontal movement odd.

The investigation concluded that the witnesses had probably seen distress flares fired from an uninhabited area, most likely a field. Triangulating the witnesses' viewing directions points to an area with no houses in the middle of fields. The colour, shape, brightness, trajectories, short duration and speed all fit this explanation. According to the analysis, the apparent horizontal movement is explained, for the first witness, by a vertical component visible in the first video and by the distance and brevity of the appearances in the second. For the other witness, it was a parallax effect caused by their own movement. The gendarmes did not identify who had launched the flares. It is possible that someone wanting to get rid of flares fired them in an open space. GEIPAN classified the case as B, probable sighting of distress flares.