Sighting in Ribiers, January 24, 2012

At around 7:45 p.m., a motorist driving along a country track noticed a stationary, cylindrical object very low in the sky, giving off an extremely intense white light. The witness stopped the vehicle and waved. They heard no noise. When they drove on, the object seemed to follow them.

Back in their village, the witness went into the garden and saw that the lights had turned orange-red. They described the sighting to their spouse, then called the gendarmerie. Gendarmes came out that same evening but saw no light, and a check among the neighbours produced no other witness.

According to GEIPAN, a bright point low on the horizon that appears to follow an observer and stops when they stop is typical of a celestial body, whose direction stays constant in azimuth. At the start of the sighting, the witness was looking towards 250°, to the south-west, where the very bright planet Venus (magnitude -3.5) stood at a low elevation of 10°. In the second part of the sighting, the witness was looking south-east, where the star Sirius was clearly visible. It is the brightest star in the sky (magnitude -1.45) but fainter than Venus, which is why it looked more distant to the witness. Because the observation directions remain uncertain, GEIPAN classified the case as B: probable observation of Venus and Sirius.