Sighting in Niort, August 1997

The witness reported this sighting in 2013. It had taken place in late August 1997, and they could not recall the exact day. On a Saturday evening around midnight, they were driving with passengers on the road between La Rochelle and Niort when everyone noticed a whitish oval mass in the cloudy sky. Smaller oval shapes were circling around it. No particular noise was heard.

The sighting went on for several hours, from the edge of Niort, then Echiré, and finally from the witness's home. The witness took several photographs with a disposable camera before going to bed. All the pictures came out black. This is the only testimony collected.

GEIPAN classified the case as B. The shape (ovoid masses arranged in a circle), the rotation around a central point with slow sweeping, the whitish colour, the large apparent size, the lack of noise, the long duration, the Saturday night during the summer holidays and the cloudy sky all match a skytracer, a nightclub searchlight that was very popular at the time. Without haze, the beams stay invisible and only the patches on the clouds can be seen, from far away and over several kilometres, which fits with the witnesses' movements. The failed photographs were considered normal, as the phenomenon was moving and not very bright. Because of the age of the events and the vague date, GEIPAN could not trace the exact source of the searchlight.