Sighting in Perpignan, June 23, 2008

At about 8:45 one morning, the witness was in a supermarket car park talking with someone who pointed out a motionless object in the sky. The witness watched it: it moved silently in a straight line toward the west. Thinking they would see it better from higher up, they ran to their partner's home on the sixth floor. The two went out onto the balcony, but by then the object was only a dot above the bus station.

The witness described a black sphere with an apparently smooth surface and grey tubes underneath, and drew it on the statement taken by investigators. They saw no smoke and no light. Two testimonies were collected, from the witness and their partner; a third person who had been in the car park never made a statement. There are no photographs.

The investigation found that the object moved with the wind, from east to west, at 12 km/h at most. Its shape, a sphere with four tubes with rounded ends, fits an advertising or festive balloon, the tubes possibly being the legs of a round body. June 23 and 24 are festival days in the département, with many balloon sellers near the exhibition grounds, and the object first appeared 400 m west of the Palais des Expositions. The witness, in an urban setting, had not noticed the wind. What struck them as odd was mainly the steady, straight movement. GEIPAN classified the case A: a strong probability of a mistaken sighting of an escaped festive advertising balloon.