Sighting in Mende (48) 12.09.1998 T2, September 12, 1998

At 21:46 on the evening of the sighting, the crew of an aircraft flying roughly over Mende noticed two flashing points of light in the sky. In radio contact with Marseille air traffic control, they reported the lights moving and at first thought they were two military aircraft, one above the other, passing well above them. At 21:54 the crew said the phenomenon was now turning back toward them, then that it had been in view for about ten minutes and was zigzagging in all directions, rising and falling. After that, the crew was busy with the reporting procedure requested by controllers and then with the descent, and made no further mention of it. The file contains only the transcript of the radio exchanges and trajectory documents from the CRNA South-East.

The investigation separated two observations. The first, the two flashing points, was the anti-collision lights of two long-haul aircraft passing above the plane. It was classified A in a separate case. For the second, those aircraft were too far away for their lights to be seen. At 21:54 their lights lay at an azimuth of 70°, while the pilots described an object at their 3 o'clock, a 20° difference. Saturn, bright and white, at 100° azimuth and a little over 20° elevation, was proposed as the probable explanation. The zigzagging could be the autokinetic effect.

This hypothesis faces several objections: a loss of sight of the lights that is neither confirmed nor ruled out, an alternation between one and two points, and no known amplitude for the movements. The pilots were never questioned afterward, and the transcript does not separate each pilot's perception. They were probably under stress, since a fatal mid-air collision involving an aircraft of the same airline had occurred six weeks earlier. GEIPAN judged the second observation unusable for lack of reliable information and classified it C.