Sighting in Saint-Benoît-des-Ondes, November 3, 2013

The witness was flying a kite when they noticed an object very high in the sky. It was metallic grey and oval, with two round wings. It moved in a very straight line at a particularly high speed. Because of what they were doing, the witness was more or less standing with their back to the wind and looking east or north-east, with the wind blowing from the west to north-west. The object passed over the kite and then disappeared toward the north according to the questionnaire, or toward the east according to the witness's own sketch.

The investigation found that the object behaved like something carried along by a steady wind of 26 to 44 km/h. It was probably flying fairly low, between 100 and 200 m, which would explain why it looked so fast. The shape the witness drew resembles the silhouette of a Mickey Mouse balloon. The witness perceived its path as about 45° off the wind direction, a gap explained by the imprecision of the estimate and by wind that varies over time and with altitude. The observation was therefore judged to be of little strangeness.

The account was very short and came from a single witness, so its consistency was rated as average; a photo or a second witness would have made it possible to confirm or rule out the hypothesis. GEIPAN classed the case as B, a probable sighting of a child's balloon.