Sighting in Pontarlier, June 22, 2021

Two witnesses were on their terrace in the late afternoon when they noticed a very bright object crossing the sky. One of them had time to photograph it with a camera. The object passed without any noise being heard. It was climbing, with a change of direction along the way, and then vanished, moving quickly above the clouds. The witness described it as a cylindrical, silver-coloured and very luminous object. Only one witness account was collected.

The witness's photographs pointed the investigation toward a novelty balloon, of the helium or mylar type. The witness had in fact first thought of a weather balloon. The vertical rise matches the usual trajectory of this kind of balloon, and the change of direction can be explained by shifting winds at high altitude. Because the remaining strangeness was low, GEIPAN did not carry out a detailed wind study and classified the case as B: a probable misidentification of a novelty balloon.