Sighting in Saint-Andéol-le-Château, December 7, 2017

In the afternoon, a witness sitting in a taxi was watching the clouds and photographing them with a smartphone. A small, circular, fluorescent green spot caught their attention: it seemed to stay still in the landscape, or to move at the same speed as the vehicle. The witness took several photographs, then shot a video a little further along the journey. They were looking for "elementals" or "beings of life" and thought they had found one following them along the road, in the landscape and in the bushes. They said they had shifted their screen aside to look at the spot directly and had confirmed that it really was there. This was the only testimony collected.

The investigation showed that the spot was a reflection of the sun produced by the smartphone's optics: a very bright point is reproduced there, in a dimmer form, symmetrically about the centre of the image. In the photo taken at 15:16:29, the sun is off-centre and the greenish spot with a halo appears where expected. In the one at 15:16:42, the reflection falls in an area already very bright, the cloud, and so does not show. In the one at 15:16:18, it falls on the bush in the foreground. The same phenomenon can be checked in the video.

GEIPAN no longer accepts reports of oddities seen only on a device screen. The naked-eye check described by the witness was not accepted: they make no distinction between what would be visible outside the optics and what exists only on the screen, and their eagerness to find something abnormal in the landscape casts doubt on their critical judgement. They may have come to believe, perhaps unknowingly, that they saw the glow again with the naked eye, briefly and without trying to confirm it. The photos unmistakably show an artefact, and GEIPAN classified the case as A, a photographic artefact caused by the sun.