Sighting in Prémesques, November 11, 1963

Three witnesses, a father and his two sons, were walking along a country path in the afternoon, around 3 or 4 p.m., when a luminous phenomenon caught their attention. An orange ball of light hung motionless beneath dark clouds for more than a minute. It then began to rotate and swung from right to left for a few seconds. After that it vanished into the clouds at very high speed, following a straight path that curved upward. The witnesses noticed no noise and no trail. No other account of the phenomenon was ever reported.

The sighting was only reported to GEIPAN in April 2008. One of the witnesses, then an 18-year-old student, reconstructed the events gradually between 2003 and 2007. The ball lightning (plasma) hypothesis was ruled out: the witness does not confirm that there was a storm during the walk, and the characteristics of the phenomenon differ from those known for ball lightning. GEIPAN classified the case as D1: an unexplained phenomenon of moderate consistency (a single, old testimony and a distant phenomenon), but with a marked strangeness.