Sighting in Lyon, May 15, 2014

At about 11 p.m., gendarmes were on patrol in a helicopter over the city when they noticed a bright point of light in the sky. Their onboard camera filmed it for more than ten minutes, and the light scintillated strongly. It stayed motionless and remained visible to the naked eye for two and a half hours.

The investigation concluded that the witnesses had mistaken the star Antares for something unusual. Several points support this: the very long duration of the observation, the object's fixed position in the sky, the strong scintillation visible on the video (even when the light appears as an image artefact, a "truncated crown"), which is common for a star low on the horizon, and the angular closeness of the Moon, which appears in the video along with the phenomenon. The case has a low level of strangeness, mostly due to the unusual look of this strongly twinkling light to witnesses who had never used the camera to observe the sky before. The testimony offered little data, but the video could be analysed. GEIPAN classified the case as A, a certain misidentification of Antares.