Sighting in Pornic, December 28, 2014

At about 6:20 pm, a passenger in a car noticed two steady lights in the sky, side by side and parallel, which caught their curiosity. As the lights passed over the vehicle, the witness looked through the panoramic roof and saw that they belonged to a dark equilateral triangle with one point aimed south. There was a light in each corner and a dimmer one in the centre. The path was a straight line.

GEIPAN noted that the witness described two, then three points of light at low altitude moving in a straight line to the south, and mentioned two flashing lights. This points to a low-flying aircraft coming from the north (possibly from Great Britain) and preparing to land at Nantes-Bouguenais from the south, into the wind; the weather record showed a north wind. The fact that the witness described a triangle rather than an aircraft seems to contradict this, but they mainly saw the powerful landing lights and, dazzled, could not make out the fuselage. A common perceptual effect, called the contour or shape illusion, creates the impression of a triangle enclosing the points of light. Because so much time had passed since the sighting, GEIPAN could not obtain the aeronautical data needed to establish which aircraft was seen. The case was classified B: probably an aircraft preparing to land.