Sighting in Maffliers, June 29, 2012

At about 6:06 a.m., someone out walking was alerted by their dog and noticed a white luminous object hovering at low altitude above a field at the edge of a forest. The sighting lasted less than twenty seconds. The witness described a large object, flat underneath and concave on top. As rain began to fall, the object rose slightly, tilted, and moved off at high speed toward the cloudy sky. The frightened witness heard no particular noise and saw no smoke. No one else reported the phenomenon.

The case closely resembles, and coincides in time with, a common natural phenomenon: the rising sun seen between two layers of cloud. Several elements do not fit, however. The direction of observation was 54° away from the sun, a gap too large to be put down to uncertainty. The tilting before the object disappeared could stem from a perceptual illusion caused by the intensity of the light, or from the influence of widely publicized sightings. As for the apparent size, nearly ten times that of the sun, overestimating the size of the sun at sunrise is common but rarely to this degree.

GEIPAN investigators visited the site twice. The first visit checked the location and the directions given, and ruled out an unintentional error by the witness in estimating direction. The second visit examined whether a complex reflection of the sun could explain seeing it in another direction, but no satisfactory hypothesis emerged. The weather that morning was very unusual and cannot be reproduced: intense heat and heavy rain the day before, and thick cloud cover that morning. GEIPAN classified the case D1, unexplained and of medium consistency.