Sighting in Marcorignan, January 27, 2011

The witness took several photographs of a rainbow. The next day, looking through them, they noticed three grey, spherical spots on one of the pictures and could not account for them. They had seen nothing unusual while taking the photos.

The investigation noted that when nobody observed anything directly, it is very hard to determine what spots appearing on a photograph are. Insects flying very close to the lens did not fit: the spherical shape of the spots and the season, winter, were inconsistent with that. The luminance of the main object is comparable to that of an electric wire visible in the image, which probably indicates that the object was at a distance from the lens similar to that of the wires. The explanation put forward was small helium-filled balloons that had drifted away or disappeared into the clouds before the next photo was taken. Since there was no direct observation, no research was done into where such balloons might have come from.

GEIPAN classified the case as B (probably identified): round grey spots discovered after the fact on a photograph.