Sighting in Poliénas, June 10, 2017

Starting at 10:30 pm, a couple was on their terrace when the two witnesses noticed two twinkling points of light in the sky. Through binoculars they made out a spherical shape and a gyroscopic effect, and the two points were also viewed through a telescope. They then saw two more spheres in another direction, along with two or three points near the first two. The witnesses described the points as unusually twinkling, in green, red and white, toward the south, seeming fixed but animated within themselves. As nothing changed, they stopped watching around 11:15 pm. At 11:30 pm they looked again, but nothing was visible. The next night, at the same time and in the same conditions, they repeated the observation. On 12 June they tried once more and saw nothing.

GEIPAN rated the case as low in strangeness and good in consistency, given that there were two witnesses. It was a misidentification of stars in the constellations Scorpius and Aquila, clearly visible in a clear sky: their position relative to the landscape and their arrangement relative to one another matched the phenomena described. The twinkling is explained by the stars' closeness to the horizon. What the witnesses saw through binoculars and telescope matches stars viewed with defocused instruments. Seeing the objects two nights running, at the same times and in the same conditions, is typical of an astronomical misidentification; their absence on the third day may be due to a temperature change that greatly reduced atmospheric turbulence, and therefore twinkling. The witnesses had not found this star configuration in a later search with an astronomy tool because they had greatly overestimated the height of the points (45 to 50° rather than the 10 to 15° near the treetops). Their impression of stillness most likely came from comparing the stars' movement with that of stars much higher in the sky. Since every oddity had an explanation, the case was classed A.