Sighting in Martigues, December 2, 2018

At around 7:05 p.m., a driver noticed two bright red points of light in the overcast sky, due south. After reaching their destination, the witness found them still visible and took two photos and a video with a smartphone. The two objects then climbed along the same line of travel and vanished into the clouds. The witness heard no sound. The sighting lasted about ten minutes, and it is the only testimony collected.

GEIPAN concluded that the witness had most probably seen Thai lanterns. The appearance fits: two red or orange points of light, as the video shows them. So does the path, since the two points followed one another, which is typical of lanterns carried by the same wind. The movement is described very imprecisely, however: it seems to have gone toward the west and the north, but how far is unknown. The wind direction aloft is also unknown, because the nearby weather stations recorded very different ground-level directions depending on location and time, so consistency with the wind could not be assessed. Ten minutes is consistent with a lantern's flight time. The disappearance was probably caused by the burners going out gradually, which the witness may have wrongly taken for the objects entering the clouds, as clouds are generally higher than the maximum altitude lanterns reach. A weekend evening is also a likely time for such festivities. The case was classified B: probable sighting of Thai lanterns.