Sighting in Nîmes, December 17, 2016

At about 8:45 pm on a Saturday evening, three people in a car park saw around thirty white points of light, one of them orange, drifting silently across a hazy sky. One of them filmed the scene. Only one account was collected, and the witness asked that the video not be published. The camera was pointed roughly east, and the lights moved across the frame from left to right.

GEIPAN concluded that this was very probably a release of Thai lanterns. The lights' appearance on the video fitted that explanation, and the wind, according to the Infoclimat record, blew from north to south, which matched their movement. The witness objected that the trajectories differed from one light to another and that some lights appeared to join others. However, the video showed the lights following one another in the same direction, and urban conditions can produce local irregularities in the wind, with some currents faster than others. The few fixed, fainter points were probably stars: cloud cover was low (1/8 according to Météociel), and Procyon, Betelgeuse and Rigel were visible low in the east. The moving lights that overtook some of the fixed points were most likely lanterns passing in front of stars. The plumes or halos seen when the camera zoomed in were attributed to optical or video aberrations. Finally, a weekend evening is more likely to see lantern releases at festive events. The case was therefore classed B, probable observation of Thai lanterns.