Sighting in Loyettes, June 18, 2019

At about one o'clock in the morning, a witness noticed a very bright phenomenon in the sky. It was at first stationary, then moved very quickly along an L-shaped path. No particular noise was heard. The witness took photographs, then saw that the phenomenon was still there before closing the shutters and going to bed. The following night, again around one o'clock, they saw it once more, having shifted toward the west. A second person also saw the phenomenon but did not fill in the GEIPAN questionnaire, so the investigation had only one testimony to work with.

The case was fairly consistent: the account was precise, and the photographs made it possible to determine an azimuth, with the Moon serving as a reference to place the phenomenon in the sky. The clock on the witness's phone was 13 minutes slow, a gap measured thanks to an aircraft visible in one photo. Comparing a sky chart for the time of the observation with a photograph showed that the planet Jupiter matched the phenomenon perfectly, in both brightness and position. Only the witness's interpretation was wrong: the object was neither geostationary nor lit by the Moon, and its L-shaped movement was merely an illusion caused by the phone shaking as the picture was taken. GEIPAN classified the case as A: a certain misidentification of the planet Jupiter.